Communication: Basing the Basics on Common Sense

I am NOT opposed to people having a good technical sense.  The race to get to the moon using the heightened abilities of electronic invention was a great thing.  It helped give birth to the microprocessor that drives so many technologies today like the cell phone.  As a result, most of us have heard of an Intel microprocessor.  But I think there is an invention that could eclipse this improvement of electronic devices.  I think it lies not in the direction of an external electronic device, but in the direction of improving our ability to use the minds each of us are equipped with as standard equipment. 

The human mind is still a wonder.  It has incredible capacities.  But lately, I am noticing that technical sense does not mean common sense.  Many people have high technical abilities, but their minds have little common sense.  Here lies the tragedy, because the mind is capable of both. 

I think common sense is greater than the lesser ability of technical sense, but it is when the two are combined together that the greatest ideal is achieved.  We seem to have come out of the 20th century with lots of the latter and few of the former.  We need now common sense to match our technical achievements. 

This is what I believe the majority of people yearn for, when it comes to even technology.  I like to call my under-developed smart phone a "dumb phone".  More times than not it fails to demonstrate smarts.  Rather it shows a great lack of common sense features.  It can make a pocket call right after I shut it down.  It can start up by simply bumping another object in my pocket.  It has immense capabilities, but few of which follow even the most basic common sense. 

My goal on this blog in this year will be to lay out what I consider to be a common sense approach to communication based on the very common words that we use to communicate every single day.  I hate to state the overly obvious, but the common is found among the very common, and not among the unique or exceptional. 

I saw this in a commercial: "Great minds think alike" followed by "Great minds think differently".  These slogans in the commercial were meant to be mutually exclusive of one another.  But I think they are not.  The ideal is common sense, where great minds think alike, and technical sense, where great minds think differently. 

I recently realized that my communication basic method of "ARWAT" is not common sense enough.  The categories of: 1)Amount, 2) Relationships, 3) Wholes, 4) Actions, and 5) Things are not on a list of most frequent words in English.  They are closer than the word categories that I had previously used called "TEAR" with the categories of !)Thing, 2Event, 3)Attribute, and 4) Relation.  Recently, I took the final step toward "very common".   That is where I found common sense!  It is alive and well once you know where to find it. 

[Sorry, I have to come back and finish this later.  You can contact me if you like to learn more sooner.  Thank you.]

Sincerely,

Jon

 

Communication: Its Importance as an Action

I ran across a quote recently that I could not pass up as a post on this blog.  It is from Stephen R. Covey.  It reads: "Communication (human and divine) is the most important single activity of man".   This quote is an important one to ponder. 

The quote is found in Covey's early book titled The Spiritual Roots of Human Relations.  It is a fascinating read from the standpoint of understanding Covey's own roots for his later 7 Habits and The 8th Habit. 

I am not endorsing all aspects of this book, but simply putting forward ideas from him that I do agree with.  His idea that communication as an activity that is very important has exciting implications, if true and if it can be proven.  For myself, I choose to ponder his idea and keep my eyes open for evidence of this idea. 

Sincerely,

Jon

Communication Basics: A Synergy of Methods

There is a very helpful book written by Steven Covey called The Third Alternative.  That is a great way to describe the alternative that I am suggesting for communication basics.  Most of what is written about listening, speaking, reading and writing is based either on the classic view of grammar or on a contemporary advance in some part of the field of linguistics (the scientific study of language).  Very rarely is a third alternative proposed, where the strengths of each is equally combined together.  The path I am proposing combines the best of classical grammar with the recent insights from linguistics.

My experience is primarily, yet not exlusively, in the field of biblical study and interpretation. What I say can be applied anywhere, but my examples come mainly from the context of a Christian college and later three different Christian seminaries.  An example of how I was given only two alternatives is that a semiary professor in the historical-grammatical tradition of biblical scholarship refused to show interest in the linguistic developments used by Wycliffe Bible Translators.  In a very recent class experirence, I noticed that the professor was still not aware of some valuable insights from linguistics that could have been very helpful.  He had no idea about the basic semantic classes of meaning: Whole, Amount, Relationship, Action, and Thing (Whole is my own addition based on classical grammar). These two streams for the most part flow apart from one another seldom combining their strengths into one stream.  As an avid trout fisherman, I have seen how the power of two streams coming together can vastly increase their force, when they combine.  I believe that is what is missing in the broad field of communications!

To have a break through, you must break from the currient views that are held.  This does not mean that you are breaking from the classic past or the promising future.  It only means you are breaking from the present.  I believe we need a break through in the current field of communication basics.

On the classical grammatical side it is important to realize that within its banks is not just the Greek tradition, but also the traditions of Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Arabic.  On the side of present day advances, there are many specialities including the advances in the field of semantics (a meaning focused approach within lingusitcs).   Both provide insights into communication.  Neither has the corner on the market, despite what advocates of either stream may say. 

I was fortunate enough to study under professors at my college and seminary levels of education, who placed each of these two alternatives in their best light.  I found the insights of inductive bible study to be very valuable for reading and interpreting, even while contemporary linguistic insights were overlooked.  My primary professors following a classical alternative were Dr. John S. Piper and Tom Stellar.  Later at the seminary level, I followed up on their teaching with studying under their mentor, Dr. Daniel P. Fuller. Most recently I was able to study this tradition under Dr. Garwood Anderson, Dr. Walter C. Kaiser and Dr. Allen P. Ross.  This teaching and experience are invaluable to me, because they represented this tradtion in its best light and provided me with a number of new tools for reading and interpretation that I did not previously possess.  The other alternative that provided me a great deal of value was that of courses in the field of linguistics.  I was extremely fortunate to study the ideas and insights of many great linguists and to even meet some of the more famous and some of the more humble.   I studied primarily under Dr. William A. Smalley and did a project on behalf of Dr. Donald A. Larson.  I also was taught by Lois Malcolm, who is now is a seminary professor.   Later I was fortunate to study linguistics for a short time at UW-Madison and got to talk to Dr. Noam Chomsky.  Besides meeting him I was earlier introduced to Dr. Kenneth Pike, a one-time President of Wycliffe.  But also I cannot leave out Dr. R. Daniel Shaw. 

Each of these names I have tried to list with some detail like their middle initials in case that some people like yourself may wish to examine the credential of each of them.  I owe each of them a great deal, because at one time I was by all my scores in the classroom very poor  in reading and writing.  Through them I have become much stronger, though I still have a good distance to go.  The greatest witness I can give to their legacy is that they have each made school much easier for me by giving me superior tools to work with rather than leaving me with inferior tools to work with in trying to reach lofty goals.   I used to just work hard to compensate for poor tools.  Now I work hard with great tools.

What I could not say as clearly before, as I can now because of Covey, is that I have synergized these two traditions into one higher powered tool for understanding basic communication.  Each alternative has allowed me to make improvements to what I was taught by the other.  For example, historical-grammatical exegesis provides sentence diagramming as one of their tools.  Quite honestly, I really struggled with this tool in the beginning.  It overwhelmed me and a number of my classmates.  It also can be very time consuming.  I think that is why too many of my fellow classmates likely no longer use this tool.  The only reason I am still using it is that I learned the tool of a semantic structure analysis (S.S.A.) from the alternative of linguistics and it helped me greatly simplify the tool of sentence diagramming. 

This combined tool also saves me a great deal of time.  I can now prepare my structure analysis in a short enough period of time that I can do a complete one from scratch for every sermon I preach.  The first key opening the door to ease was to focus on action words, as I analyzed a text into its parts.  The second key opening the door to ease was understanding the primary meaning classes of words, so that I could quickly identify any of them in the original text or in a translation.  The structure analysis is also more technology friendly, because of its straight line layout versus the arcing method of sentence diagramming which uses curved lines .  It is easy to do in Excel without any fancy extra enhancements or technical training!

So fundamentally I want you to know that I am synergizing two alternatives that are greater than using either of the other two alternatives all by themselves.  I am offering the two alternatives together that form a much stronger third alternative to either of them alone.  It is like the streams of water in your state, county or country.  As they merge together like the tributaries of the Mississippi, they form together the mighty Misssissippi.

Sincerely,

Jon

Communication Basics: Combining the Strengths of Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic

There are many angles from which to explain the strength of my idea on communication basics.  One of the angles is from that of classic rhetoric, grammar and logic.  From this angle the strength of the method I use is that it combines the strengths of rhetoric, grammar and logic; rather than depending on primarily grammar. 

Contemporary schooling has turned the basics of classic education into the 3 R's of reading, writing and arithmetic.  In classic education the big 3 were rhetoric, grammar and logic.  When I studied linguistics in college I now realize that the greatest gain I experienced came from combing rhetoric, grammar and logic.  Yet it is the renewed use of rhetoric that was the real source of greatest insight. 

Classic rhetoric recognized four classes of meaning plus the whole that unites them.  I have simplified those four classes or categories down to amount, relationship, action and thing.  This is not discovered in reading or writing classes that rely mainly on grammar.  Likewise, logic is no longer taught as essentially logic, but is now mathematical logic and so is taught indirectly through mathematics. 

So what all of this boils down to is using a method that does not set aside the insights of classic rhetoric, that does not exalt grammar too much and that does not ignore the logic of mathematics.  That is what my linguistics professors in college handed on to me as a legacy.  I thank them very deeply for their insights and for the experience of excitement rather than boredom as I approach language.  

Sincerely,

Jon

Communication Taught from Simple to Complex

I was taught the K.I.S.S. principle long ago in coaching. It is also important for communication and in particular in teaching people how to define words by other words.

My favorite example of this recently is the relationship between the Golden Rule and the 2nd Greatest Commandment from the Bible. One reads: "Do for others what you would have them do for you." The second reads: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

I think you can go along way toward defining the words of the second from the first set of the first. It would look like this:

"Love" means "do for" (at its least)
"Your" means "you" (at its least)
"neighbor" means "other" (at its least)
"as" means "what you would have them (others) do for you (in contrast to others)"
"yourself" means "you" (at its least)

Sometimes in teaching communication we need to remember the rule that it is good to keep things simple initially and only later move people up to a higher level. I hope this example demonstrates to you the rule of K.I.S.S.

Sincerely,

Jon

Communication is Hidden in Plain View

Hidden (from me) in Plain View (of others)

In the game of hide and seek it is difficult to hide yourself in plain view of the person doing the seeking. The goal, after all is said and done, is to hide and not be found. Yet in the game of communication, where we want people to discover our meaning and we want to be plain, it is too often the case that our meaning is hidden from the person seeking the meaning. The goal, after all is said and done, is for our plain meaning to be found. Our meaning is not to be hidden. It is not to be a game of hide and seek. If it becomes that, then people get tired of communicating, just like they would get tired of a prolonged game of hide and seek. Sometimes in hide and seek, you just tell the person hiding to come out and that it is safe, rather than continue to try to find them. I think too often in the teaching of communicating, our method has hidden things in plain view.

Let me explain. Some things are hidden from me that are in plain view of others, or vice versa. The question for communication is: What makes things plain and what makes things hidden? Or more to the point: Why are so many things hidden from us in communication? Or in the Christian context, why so many interpretations of the same text in the Bible?

I think there is an explanation, one at least hinted at by my professor in college, Dr. Don Larson. He used to say he was mad. What was he mad about? He was upset about the stark contrast between learning at home and studying in school. He called the first learning and the second studying. He wasn’t against either one, but he felt the balance of the two had been lost in schools. He saw the dominance of studying over learning as harmful and he was trying hard to bring back a balance by re-inserting learning into schools with a focus on studying.

I want to take this a step further. I want you to do an experiment for me following in the tradition of the studying you have done in school. I want you to find a few things for me in the place you are right now within 2 seconds. The rule is that you cannot find words, but only things. If you do find words, then you are cheating and in school that means a zero for your score. Find for me a noun. Your two seconds are up. The result, if you followed my rules strictly, is that you found none.

If you want, you can go a little further. I want you to find an adjective. Next, I want you to find a conjunction. Finally, find a verb. Your next 6 seconds are up. The result, if you followed my rules strictly, is that you still found none of them. Don’t feel silly, if you thought you found one. I know now that you will never try to find these things again, unless you are allowed to look for words.

Now I want you to do another experiment for me following the same set of rules and you must find them within 2 seconds. Again, the rule is that you cannot find words, but only things. Again, please do not cheat. Find for me a thing. Your two seconds are up. The result, if you followed my rules strictly, is that you found at least one thing. If you are in your office, it might be a light or obviously your computer.

If you want, you can go a little further. I want you to find an amount. Next, I want you to find a relationship. Finally, find an action. Your six seconds are up. I would imagine you got 2-3 more right. If you are in your office, you could have found one phone, a cord connected to your computer and the light shining in your window. Don’t feel silly, if you didn’t get them all. I know on the next try you would get all four without breaking a sweat.

These two experiments are meant to demonstrate one main thing. The most important thing is to notice that in the first experiment, the words I used hid from you things. They did not take you directly to them. These are categories of words, not things. Also noticeable is that in the second experiment, the words I used were plain to you, when it came to things. Well, at least now that I gave you some examples. These are categories for things and not just classifications for words.

The problem is seen at its height, when we try to teach language in school whether it is native or foreign to us. The typical approach in the United States is that in about the 5th or 6th grade, we teach a thing called grammar through the parts of speech. This is meant to help us with at least two elements of communication, reading and writing. The one problem I am trying to point out here, is that the method is about words and studying, not things and learning.

In total, I think there are at least five weaknesses in our grammatical method in the United States: (1) it follows a one-dimensional approach to language versus a multi (five)-dimensional approach to language, (2) it has too great of an information load for our brains with eight parts of speech versus having an information load of only four to five things in a set, (3) it deals with later development of language skill rather than earlier development of language skill, (4) it focuses on words and study, a grammar of words, rather than on learning and things, a classification of things and words or word uses and (5) it makes things hidden rather than plain. We need to bring the things we need out in the open. It is this last problem that I am dealing with here.

The problem is that words have become more important than things as education has expanded into universal education in places like the United States. We need instead to keep words and things side by side. We need to teach and study alongside of know and learn. In our earliest development as children, we were concerned with needs related to the things that would satisfy our basic needs. We also though needed to relate to parents for what we needed. So we used some rather simple ways to get what we needed like food for our stomach. I’ve seen crying work effectively. Later we studied words with our parents, who also taught us those words, in the context of things we needed.

In the approach I take to communication, one of the great advantages it has is that it is plain, because it applies to things and words. It ties together both learning and studying. In a chart form of categories , it appears like this:

Communication (Whole)
1. Amount (Part)
2. Relationship (Part)
3. Action (Part)
4. Thing (Part)

When I first studied this method of learning communication, there was a problem with it. It was that a few items were not plain on the thing level. In place of amount, they had the concept of attribute, which I think is harder to find in the world of things. In place of action, they had the concept of event, which I think is also harder to find in the world of things because of its limitations in the realm of things. They both seem to apply better in the realm of words.

Because these words apply better to things than the words of grammar, I think they enhance our ability to make things plain. I know for me personally, this has been a major benefit. Recently, I took an online course and I aced the final exam. If I remember correctly, this may be the first time I didn’t get a single answer wrong on a final. The reason, I recall, for not getting every answer right on a final exam previously is, that I would typically misread at least one question. What this method has done for me is to make things plain or clear. If I get stumped, then I can go back to basic things to put words into a plain context.

Let’s go back to the earlier questions and look at some answers. The first question for communication was: What makes things plain and what makes things hidden? An answer is that grammar hides things, because it is only about word categories and not about thing categories. Or more to the point of the first question: Why are so many things hidden from us in communication? An answer is that it is because we rely on a method that favors words over things, rather than joining them together like two sides of a coin. Or applying the second question in the Christian context: Why so many interpretations of the same text in the Bible? An answer is that too often our method is limited to language, words and their rules and does not look enough at the things in the context. Again, because the questions asked are often only about language and not about things, things are hidden that otherwise could be plain.

So using categories of things and words has helped make things hidden from me in plain view of the communicator, to become plain also for me. I want the same thing to be available to others, including yourself. We need to work from categories of things, not just categories of words. Remember our earlier experiment. We need to change education in the direction that my linguistics professor, Dr. Donald Larson, wanted to take it. Things are in plain view, if only we will change our basic approach to communication and talk about things and not just words. Is the thing I'm saying plain and not just my words?


Sincerely,

Jon