LOG CABIN CHRONICLES No more alphabet soup
FRED RYAN
"Better communication" is the clich&ecute; solution to everything. While everybody claims to recognize the importance of, and the difficulty in, communicating well, everybody also feels they're pretty good at it.
If we're all so good at it, why is it still such a problem?
Reality check: can anyone in a domestic relationship, especially with kids, believe they're "good at communicating?"
If so, they're even better at dreaming.
Personal and family communications are major challenges, but so is public communicating. For example, communications in the public domain often include a flood of acronyms - the use of letters instead of a name. Acronyms can be helpful - who wants to write "National Capital Commission" (common enough in our area) when they can use NCC? But usually they're no help at all.
Yes, they abbreviate long names - and often those long names are the most artless possible, as if the founders want to put their whole mission statement into their name, for example, "Conseil régional de l'environnement et du developpement durable de l'Outaouais."
This gets out of control with social and mental health support groups. The problem, then, is the brainlessness of the names.
Worse, many of these acronymed-groups are so inwardly focused they seem to think everyone knows and uses their acronym. They use their call letters as if we all knew what the heck they are talking about, and, of course, no one does, except about five people in the bureaucracy.
To demonstrate, here are call letters which arrived at the West Quebec Post in e-mail communiqués during the second week of December:
Communication in public discourse would be improved greatly by less use of these abbreviations and short-forms -- jargon -- and by more clear and straightforward statements. Excessive name complexity and excessive acronym use are signs of unclear thinking, and are also pompous and bombastic.
Bombast is the tool of many public figures -- and maybe acronyms are an improvement. Here's an example of the way politicians may think or speak, taken from a weekly newspaper in the middle of December; this "spokesperson" commented on public-private partnerships thus: "Potential liabilities include the discussion in the Treasury about the size of the program contingency, as opposed to the project contingency, which is itself included in the costings."
Huh?
"Spokesperson" means an expert in communication. This example may indicate that the goal of improving communications in the public realm, in "the public discourse" as it's euphemistically called, is next to hopeless. Isn't it time to improve?
Copyright © 2007 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/01.07 |