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United States24799 Posts
Something I've come to gradually realize is that people generally are really bad at explaining things.
To be fair, explaining something clearly isn't that easy. You need to correctly assess the position of the person you are explaining something to. You need to put yourself in their shoes, and you need to tell them what they need to hear to reach the end result (assuming your goal is for them to understand a specific thing rather than develop their overall cognitive skills).
Some listeners are better at dealing with poor explanations than others. This is a sort of reverse engineering where you figure out why the "explainer" said what (s)he did, and try to use that to triangulate towards the proper message they wanted to convey, rather than simply asking them to clarify/rephrase or even just failing to understand.
Lately I've been observing my life through a lens of "how good/bad are people at explaining things" and it's actually pretty horrifying to me. Like everyone, I'm better at explaining some things and worse at others. However, the percentage of explanations I hear/receive that seem terrible is way higher than I would have thought before beginning this experiment. I have neither data nor hard evidence, and I'm not actually trying to convince anyone.
I think there are two things you must work on if you want to explain something better. The first is to better understand the topic that you are trying to explain, and the second is to work on general explanation/communication skills. One of the biggest hurdles of trying to understand a person's explanation is often their failure to complete thoughts/sentences, or to give perspective on what words they are using and why.
Maybe I should pursue this further. I should record explanations into transcripts and analyze them. This, in conjunction with an 'interview' by the person who was supposed to be learning something will allow me to see what will/won't help make explanations more effective. What research is already being conducted like this? I have never studied communication and the like so I might find the 'go to' resources for this topic fascinating.
This is all just my own thoughts/speculation.
 
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This is why there are so many terrible teachers out there. Just stand in front of the blackboard and talk some bullshit, how hard could it be? From kindergarten to university we have people who should not be put in the postition to explain things to others. Definitely a topic worth looking into.
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United States22154 Posts
A major issue I've seen with people trying to explain things to each other is that most of the time they don't bother defining their terminology, which means explanations become muddled and confused. Interesting topic, I certainly agree.
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On May 29 2012 03:18 micronesia wrote:
Something I've come to gradually realize is that people generally are really bad at explaining things.
To be fair, explaining something clearly isn't that easy. You need to correctly assess the position of the person you are explaining something to. You need to put yourself in their shoes, and you need to tell them what they need to hear to reach the end result (assuming your goal is for them to understand a specific thing rather than develop their overall cognitive skills).
Some listeners are better at dealing with poor explanations than others. This is a sort of reverse engineering where you figure out why the "explainer" said what (s)he did, and try to use that to triangulate towards the proper message they wanted to convey, rather than simply asking them to clarify/rephrase or even just failing to understand.
According to my limited teaching experience, this is sooooooo true important and difficult. It's also what makes explaining things such a rewarding experience.
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I agree whole heartedly, and I have caught myself being a horrible explainer a couple of times myself.
I thing I may add though is that people generally don't realize that they are terrible at explaining things. So when they do explain something terribly, and the other person doesn't get it even after you've tried for hours, frustration starts to mount, and then problems can occur.
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Not all people's brains work the same (mine seems to be an extreme case here!). So when you have to explain things to more than one person at once, you already can't explain anything "properly" anymore, you have to find some middle ground. There is no objectively correct way to explain things. One person could understand in just a few words, the other would need a whole book. Neither of the extremes is right, and anything inbetween is either too much or too little.
So how do you observe people explaining things? All you really can do is ask someone who has just gotten an explanation for just himself whether he did understand the explanation or not. You can't draw a conclusion from the explanation itself because it was not targeted at you.
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What are you trying to say?
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People are generally bad at following anyone else's thoughts.
We generally assume other people's brain works like ours and just slightly different, more or less smart, more or less focused, etc. Which is in fact not true.
Everybody learns stuff differently - some with the help of imagery; some with simple constant repetition; some with a lot of examples; some by reading and some by listening; some very creatively and some rather conservatively.
And then everybody comes from a different background. Some don't use the words others use with the same intent, meaning or connotation. A neutral word for one person might sound negative or positive to another one. Or the other way round.
And once people realize this, it's still really tough to actually follow the other person's learning and comprehension patterns. You need to open up to others, and listen to them carefully to them. Learn where they're coming from, how they learn, what knowledge they work with etc.
That's why it's generally hard for people to teach who only like to hear themselves talking all the time. Despite how ironic that sounds.
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I agree with this but also you have to remember most people don't give the proper effort to even listen half the time..
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United States24799 Posts
On May 29 2012 04:32 SnetteL wrote:
What are you trying to say?
hahahaha
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EPT
