Communicating

The lady who proof reads this newsletter just might go crazy with this article.

If you can read the following, you have a strange mind, like mine. Only 55 people out of 100 can.

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a word are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is that the frsit and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

How about it? Could you read the above?  When I first glanced it looked like gobbly gook.  But then I just shrugged and said, “I’ll give it a try.” And sure enough I read the whole thing out loud without a hitch. It made perfect sense to me.

The above started me thinking about how impatient I have become communicating with others. Perhaps they talk with a foreign accent and I tune them out. Or maybe they talk too slow or too fast. Somewhere I read that elderly people often cannot understand what others are saying, not because they cannot hear them. It is because others are talking too fast.  The reason they cannot understand you is because you are talking faster than they can comprehend what you are saying. I often turn on newscasters on TV and I cannot understand them for that reason. Maybe if you are having a problem communicating with older folks it is because their minds can’t keep up with you. The remedy is for you to just slow down.

When I was a full time professional speaker for so many years and I had a booking here in the South I would have to remind myself (Being a Yankee) to slow down when I speak to southerner audiences.  Same with folks on the street. 

Not too long ago I spoke to an audience and recited one of my poems and asked for feedback. One very honest elderly gentleman said, “I didn’t have a clue as to what your poem said because you were a hollerin’ it out so quickly.”

Living here in Hillsborough, North Carolina you never know who you might be talking with. The Wall Street Journal recently referred to Hillsborough as “America’s Little Literary Town.”  God knows, I might be talking with Ernest Hemmingwitz.