Is the written component overrated in professional communication?

Communication is one of the most important parts of the software developer profession. Or indeed, just about any profession. Instructions get passed along, feedback is received and along the chain of events that happen, information mutates. This information may affect what other operations take place, and this in turn has an ever-widening effect on things further down the chain.

So yes, communication is vital. But just speaking of communication alone would be a scope too large for a single blogpot or article. Thus, for today, I would like to speak on something I discovered about verbal and written communication, as a software developer.

Written or verbal?

Written communication is generally preferred because there is a "paper" trail that can be referred to if clarification is required. Verbal communication is considered transient and informal. No corporation, for instance, would consider a verbal exchange a legally-binding contract. No team lead would ever rely solely on verbal communication to convey instructions. The main mode of communication is almost invariably task specifications written in a Kanban card, or even an email.

With written communication, one of the advantages is that people generally are able to carefully consider their words before hitting the Send button (not that everybody does, regrettably). Therefore, the consensus seems to be that written communication is generally clearer.

However...

Is written communication truly clearer than verbal? There are some instances where this is not the case.

Recently there was an incident in the company where I worked. My colleague encountered a problem with the system I was managing. To her credit, she went by the book - sent me screenshots, even a video, and what she thought was a clear explanation of what she had expected as output, and what was wrong with the output she had received.

The problem was with the last part - I understood not a single thing she was saying in her email. Even discounting typos and grammatical errors, I could not get a sense of what she was trying to tell me. After a couple of frustrating exchanges through email, we communicated via a video call. Within minutes of her speaking, the lightbulb went off in my head. Now when I looked back at her emails and her written descriptions, I knew exactly what she was saying.

Hearing words
makes a difference.

Was what she had written in the emails, different from what she had verbally said? Now that I had a chance to do a side-by-side comparison, not so much. The difference was mainly in inflection and tone - both of which were missing in her written emails, and probably in most written media. However, in our local lingo, both inflection and tone convey a multitude of different meanings, and as such they play a huge part in the communication process. Listening to her speak was simply not the same as reading her writing. Probably because she tended to write the way she spoke - another cardinal sin of communication, but one we won't get into today.

In another example...

I had a similar experience on the Clubhouse app. I was in a room where this woman from Trinidad And Tobago in the continent of Africa, was reading from a novel set in that area. I had previously read a bit of the novel, but given up halfway because the dialogue, on the written page, was incomprehensible to me.

However, as I heard her say the words of the dialogue, which was in the Trini slang, using her Trini accent, suddenly it all made perfect sense.

I don't know exactly why that would be the case. I do know that if I were to read the dialogue again, it would be from a position where, having already heard it, I would now know what it meant.

The Communicative Conclusion

Verbal communication can be more powerful than people realize. With audio, one can convey some other dimension in the communication, pieces which may be missing in a written medium. One might argue that being more proficient at written English might solve the problem. It will mitigate the problem, certainly, but it will never replace what verbal communication brings to the table.

Let's have this in writing!
T___T