On writing and other forms of communication

Thinking about writing styles: I sometimes read a book and love the way the writer has what seems like a command of the words and language. I read a sentence and almost like a wonderful mouthful of food find there is a digestive experience where the sentence hits me with a deeper meaning after I have read it. As if it carried me through with meaning helping me follow the idea and then hit me with a reverberation (aftertaste) of deeper meaning as the idea settles into the paragraph. But it is not their turn of phrase that is doing this, it is how they are using the words like surgical tools to focus, hone in on an idea and how they have stripped away all unnecessary diversions so that they send me straight to the point they are making with that sentence. As if they had used the words to penetrate straight in to my mind and laid an idea there in the uncommunicable realm of my own ideas. This is why I am convinced words are of no use unless they describe something already existing – an idea. I have called this a 3D idea because it can be described from different angles by different forms of communication. (Akinleye 2012). I feel words are NOT ideas. They are part of the tools of cooperation that is communication.

Dewey says:

“The heart of language is not expression of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought. It is communication ; the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners.”  Experience & Nature (1958 ) pg 179

So there is the idea, and the want to share it that is communication, the partnership that is communicating, and the tools  how we share it.

Next step: so not only should words be there for a working purpose to cooperate (not to augment or illustrate your thinking). In other words – words and thinking are not necessarily related. Words do not have to be the tools we use to communicate. In fact as dancers we know that in many instances a movement or sound expresses an idea much more understandably than words could ever. Mr Mitchel used to sing exercises to us and come up behind us and make what I could only call a ‘grunt’ but it explained the steps  feeling and direction of energy of the dance far more than words. And as we develop, as dancers we understand the steps, energy and direction are part of larger ideas about connection, balance rhythm ideas that are all learnt and expressed in the wordless realm of physical experience (of which my work is about suggesting that this is the realm of life). So if words are nothing but tools and they are not always useful tools then why should you be limited to them especially when you are talking about dance (often a wordless experience). Well you need to use words because that is what universities use and you need to communicate in the language of the University to talk to it.

BUT what about people at work, in the dance field – they are not a University? Yes, good point. What are they used ideas coming in the form of. How do you share in your profession?

So you will have two artefacts of the idea. (You have to have the ideas first in order to communicate them)

1)   the University artefact – words and paper (we know what this is because we work in a university so we can help by telling you)

2)   A professional artefact – this will be??? (We can’t tell you because we don’t work in your profession exactly, we are not there. You know best)

To be explicit (and this is the second time because I just wrote all this and lost it to my ailing computer!!!) this post is about words and communication. And has led to the advice that you write to explain, not write to sound like you know what you are talking about! (There is a difference). And then the post attempts to explain the Professional Artefact of Module Three.

[Point of interest. Image words not being things that represent anything to you, like I wrote

‘Getthy si heffney ard wenty bleu’.

It makes sense but not to you, so it has to mean something outside the words they are just to communicate an idea. But in case they don’t. that does not mean the idea does not exist it just means the form of communication is not working. You have to know what you want to communicate before you write. The idea is not in the words it is 3D and words are only one dimension. That is what it is like from my dyslexic prospective.]

What do you think?

Adesola

Akinleye, Adesola. (2012). Orientation for Communication: embodiment, and the language of dance. Empedocles: the European journal for the philosophy of communication, 4(2), pp.101-112.

Dewey, John. (1958). Experience and nature. New York,: Dover Publications.