Doing The Easy Parts Fast Impairs Communication

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

When someone begins to learn a musical instrument they play the easy parts fast and the hard parts slowly.

When doctors had to sign a lot of paper prescriptions their signatures were quick to scrawl but impossible to read. Elementary school teachers write beautiful, regular, even letters on the board.

I grew up with a stutter and spent years in speech therapy about it. So I've had a lot of guided practice on listening in detail to what I'm saying and how I'm saying it. I've had a lot of coaching on paying attention to how I sound to others. 

Most people don't realize that the things they say most often are the hardest to understand.

Language learners might study sentences for shopping, "Did you find everything you needed? How will you be paying?" then be thwarted at hearing "Dja finerrythin y'need? Cəshr card?"
 
Most people haven't worked on speaking more slowly nor enunciating more clearly so if you ask them to repeat themselves they'll do so more loudly with an angrier tone. 
 
When I'm teaching my kid something I already how to do, I aim to do more than demonstrate the way I usually do it. I think through the steps I'm doing. I'm alert for which steps they can and can't do yet. I prepare to break down a step into even more detail if they don't start doing that step themselves. 

In the cashier example, the clerk said eleven words but the customer heard five. So if the customer asks "Wait, what was the second word you said?" the cashier isn't going to focus on the same chunk of phonemes. Similarly I can't expect my student to ask a clear-to-me question about what I just demonstrated; first I need to interpret the question in terms of the student's experience.

Anyway I was at an appointment yesterday and I had to ask the young professional to repeat her name like four times before I could write a note about whom I was speaking with and later asked her "Excuse me, I've been missing like one word in four, would you please try to speak more slowly?" and furthermore I spoke very slowly myself to manipulate her into reflecting slowing down and keeping a neutral tone.