LOST IN ENCODING
I love books but hate reading. Growing up I struggled to read and always found it dreadfully boring. Not much has changed since then. Today I never read for pure entertainment, as others seem to; instead, I read mostly to find information. Aside from being a slow and very poor reader (likely having some mild, undiagnosed form of dyslexia or something) much of my reading frustration comes from noticing how the written word is a particularly poor form of communication.
As a very little kid I developed an appreciation of and preference for radio. While reading was always slow and awkward (and the words, phrases, meanings, and intentions frequently unclear) radio was a stark contrast. Thanks to my mom, the radio was just always on in the kitchen and in the car, with the dial firmly anchored to the news, current events, and speciality programming of the CBC. This listening and learning that happened effortlessly and almost constantly seemed to just burn information straight into my memory. And, unlike with text, I seldom felt confused. (This radio immersion probably also explains why I’ve always had a fondness for ad-free radio, why I so enjoy the present proliferation of podcasting, and why I’m a bit of an information junky...)
Surely other people have had a similar experience. If not, you must have noticed the difference between text and audio. This difference has to be obvious to anyone who’s tried speaking, listening, and reading. I mean, a radio show or podcast, enhanced with sound effects and music, is really the best form of communication we’ve come up with. Is it not? Contrast this with text: tweets, emails, editorials, journal articles, and even entire books are wildly open to misinterpretation, and are actually misread, in a manner and with a frequency that the spoken word seldom is. Yes, we all mis-hear one another or the lyrics of a song occasionally (I do so all the time) but does this compare, at all, to the misreading and misunderstanding of text – which can only ever happen with the very words spelled out right there in front of you?
Of course I’m not talking about the vague and obscurant language common in legal, political, academic, or business text. This, as you know, is mostly deliberate obfuscation and an entirely different issue. What I am talking about are instances where clear communication is the aim. For an extreme example, many of us have had the displeasure of reading a passage in a text book, or even a question on an exam, that was vague or easily misunderstood. In these instances words were chosen and sentences composed and edited with clarity as a priority. I think this highlights how difficult it is to write well: when professional writers, academics, and teachers (people who write all the time and even teach, edit, and grade the writing of others) struggle themselves. But that’s not the whole story. No. Writing well isn’t just difficult.
Part of the problem, in my mind at least, is that our written language simply ignores much of what is going on when we speak (and thus about half the meaning encoded there.) Why is that? Our speech is dynamic and multidimensional. Maybe you’ve noticed. When we talk, the same word or part of a word (a syllable, letter, or sound), gets different emphasis in different contexts. And without formal training we all learn to embed meaning this way: through changes in silence, loudness, pitch, timbre, and timing. All of these manipulations are elementary and critical to literacy and fluency. If you don't understand that every word and syllable has different visual and auditory components, and that altering them alters their meaning, well, you are not literate in any real sense. And yet these non-nuances, this explicit fundament of language, is commonly ignored by writers.
Virtually all writing I’ve ever come across lacks the texture, shape, movement, and feeling of speech. And I know this isn’t just my own interpretive error because when people read or recite just about anything I hear these misinterpretations. Folks often say all the right words but with emphasis in what is, at least to my ear, very clearly the wrong place. Hearing this just once makes obvious how such a simple omission or alteration can, and often does, change things dramatically. Additionally, when researchers test people on their reading comprehension they find that, when shown a series of emails for example, nobody can reliably distinguish between sarcasm and sincerity. You think you can. In fact, you’re sure you can. And you’ll send emails yourself believing that you’re being clear and concise; only, it turns out that you never are. How and why is that so?
Well, someone might write something like: “This sentence is ridiculous.” [Insert any sentence you like here.] With no visual emphasis anywhere, does that mean it’s to be read flat, without any one word standing out more than any other? The reader is left to assume so. But it’s hard for me to read it that way or even imagine a context in which no emphasis was intended. The writer simply must have wanted it to be read a certain way. And yet, when I find sterilized syntactic roadkill like this out in the wild, context doesn’t always help me select from the different possible readings. And there are many possible readings, even with such a simple sentence. Emphasis on any one word or pairing of words gives the sentence at least a whole different feel and often an entirely different meaning. “THIS sentence is ridiculous.” -VS- “This sentence IS ridiculous.” These are different sentences and have different meaning despite their identical composition. Yet, instead of writing what one means, the writer leaves the reader to their own inevitable mis-reading. (For the love of Ferdinand de Saussure, why?)
As above, a wordsmith is free to apply bold or italics or underlining or even write in CAPITALS to encode missing meaning. They may also employ dots, dashes, spaces, and exclamation points in creative ways for emphasis too. But notice how all of these are only partial solutions that are themselves vague, two-dimensional, and just as open to misinterpretation.
For instance, IF I WRITE ALL IN CAPITALS, do you read this as an increase in volume? If so, did you read it slightly louder than normal conversational speech or as me yelling at the top of my lungs in text form? Maybe something in between? If I was yelling, was it just louder or was it more aggressive too? Maybe it was none of the above. Maybe I didn’t even consider the auditory and only intended it as a visual emphasis. Regardless, you notice the tremendous and significant differences between these various readings.
Well, what about the trusty old exclamation point? It seems pretty simple and direct; and yet the same ambiguity exists as with all-caps, only with some additional failings too. As you're aware, you've seldom read a sentence ending in an exclamation point correctly the first time through! (See?) Weirdly, you fail by design. You simply must fail as you can only ever arrive at this modifier after reading all the words the author intended to emphasize. And, as the emphasis is seldom on the last word or syllable, your discovery changes how you read and understand the entire sentence. And you are then forced to go back and re-read the text, maybe several times. Curious, no? (Why would such a tool even exist in the first place, I have to ask, and then why would anyone ever use it?)
That we knowingly create such awkwardness and inevitable misunderstanding is baffling to me. Even more confounding is how the same people who would stamp their foot at the sight of a wayward comma, a misspelled word, or a minor grammatical error – none of which may render a sentence less readable or understandable (definitely not any less so than using grammar and punctuation "properly") – nevertheless seem to have nothing to say about the certain and total failure of an idea (and maybe the essence of an entire book) due to the lack of effective emphasis. Why is that?
Writing just appears fundamentally broken. And in a thousand years it seems we've never come to agree upon useful conventions to improve the situation. This is so strange to me. As I say, it’s stranger still because these failings are both of critical and obvious to anyone capable of reading. With all seriousness, if all public urinals were designed in such a way that to use them one had to perform a handstand, and a high-velocity spin, I would find this less frustrating than reading, and the obvious and needless design flaws less conspicuous or consequential. Troubling, I can't imagine anyone feeling any different; and yet...
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