There is no Cert for Comms

“We are currently clean on OPSEC” ~Unknown

“Stop trying to make fetch happen.” ~ Regina George

Part 1: Yap

Playing well with others is a core competency. As my child advances through preschool, I’m beginning to hear noise about the other kids (never mine!) and their tendencies to bite, poke, gouge, scream, and otherwise partake in antisocial behavior. No doubt they’ll be robbing grannies in twenty years. I kid on that, but in all things, making yourself clear to the other party is vital in every sphere of life, save perhaps Dadaist art.

If you’re like me and you enjoy writing, this is one of your hardcore competencies. You may have spent hours agonizing over whether a single word or phrase, juggling your concerns about whether something has a Germanic or Latinate or Greek or Norse origin and how it will impact a given body of English speakers. I applaud these efforts: unlike many fields of language study, amateur etymologists don’t always pursue their passion purely to impress other amateurs. They might have money on the line.

This is trebly true when it comes to technology. By its nature, it involves technique; to wit, complexity and a sliding scale of mastership. You will accrete experience via lessons in the form of expensive instructors, free YouTube videos, books, costly mistakes, painful experience and many more painful tutors. Over time, you may gain a mild degree of competence or decide that your time is better spent baking actual bread rather than rhetorical dough. No judgment there: I’m a gardener myself of many seasons and it’s more rewarding to crunch into a pepper or cucumber you grew yourself rather than buy one at the store. They taste better too.

Most of the examples of the ‘tutors’ I listed above involve other people. The soulless smiling doofus trying to min-max the algorithm, the author of your latest Amazon purchase, the teacher awaiting tenure or retirement. These examples are 90-99% one-way streets. But most of your experience will involve something closer to a 50/50 split in terms of your communication with the second party. You will gab over your webcam perhaps, or smell their breath, hear their malapropisms, see the hair on their upper lip. You will interact with a second soul, another core of a personal universe.

Not everyone is cut out for this. I personally loathe eye contact and would prefer to keep my focus on a nearby notepad, my garden, my gradually cooling coffee mug. But I do it because the powers that be would rather I learned than move to a hermitage in the mountains and devote my life to monkish disciplines. It takes effort, energy, involvement. It’s something you learn from your parents and peers and middle-school drama. You talk as gently and clearly and curtly as possible; avoid flowery language or purple references. Time is precious and attention is a non-renewable resource. If you’re ever speaking at a funeral or a wedding or a college commencement, please keep in mind that not everyone got a full night’s sleep.

Part 2: Scrip

And then there’s the nightmare of putting it down on a page for posterity.

I’m better at the latter. I don’t need to engage in social interaction when I write: I do it best alone. I’ve read a lot of books and know a lot of words and want to be like the authors who have changed my view on life. Like any medieval saint-venerating peasant, I know I won’t be like any of the worthies that get their faces done in leaden windows or illuminated manuscripts. But it’s always worth following their example as best one can.

Talking and writing are, outside of a few core technical competencies, the holy dyad of functional learning. The wise Plato hears a few words from the legendary Socrates. He reinforces these ideas to the brilliant Aristotle: since Plato had nothing but scorn for literature, he wrote down nothing. Had Aristotle not tutored Alexander the Great, we might not know about any of them. But the various worthies of Persia thought it wise to inform their descendants as to what all these heavily armed Athenians were doing in a land so far from the Mediterranean.

Herodotus might’ve been the start of history in the Western tradition, but history is a big tree with a lot of roots and a lot of twigs. We’re just leaves on the tips of its branches. Like the old Norse tree that bound Heaven and Hell to a single trunk, it’s rotten at its core. Termites munch on its innards and a serpent chews at its roots. Various enterprising upstarts would love to chop it down to make it into a boat to get to an intended destination. But it had a strong seed and good roots, and if anything, we have a need to keep our leaf and twig moving skyward.

That’s the accretion of knowledge I’m referring to. You can’t learn it because it’s already in you. I’m not here to claim that I’ve got the finest knack for it, so you shouldn’t either. But like any skill, it takes honing. No one can prove that your poesy is better or worse than the next gal or guy’s, but it’s the work of a lifetime and something that everyone should take pride in.

Because at the end of the day, we’re not unlike Bede or Shakespeare or Orwell or any of those fine communicators. You’ve got the words that you hear and the experiences you’ve lived. And you’re already dead. If you want someone, maybe even yourself, to avoid repeating the pains of your innocent misspent youth, well damn the man. Ignore your fear; recognize that mastery will come in time and write it all down as fast as you can.

Because you will be the first to forget it ever happened.