Communication doesn’t start with me. It starts with you.

19 min readSep 17, 2020

[I speak the way I write, and I write the way I speak. For a novel communication experience, I encourage you to listen to me reading this Chapter out loud. Just as I’ve done with Chapter One. Alternatively, here is a soundtrack for you.]

Why, hello there. Welcome to Chapter Two.

Thank you for clicking. Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here.

Some of you know what I’m up to, because you’ve read Chapter One. If you haven’t, might you consider doing so? It provides some helpful context about me and the overall trajectory of these Chapters. It’s an excellent amuse-bouche. [All of this being said, I’m fairly sure most of you will dive right into the main course. Don’t worry — I’m not at all offended. I’d do exactly the same thing. But if you’re bewildered by some of my ingredients, don’t say I didn’t warn you!]

Let’s write a story together.

I have a confession to make: this is not just a Medium article. This is a Chapter in a living, breathing novel, and you are watching it unfold. More than that, actually: you are directly influencing the narrative, as you will soon see.

I’ve always wanted to disrupt narrative. Up until a few months ago, I ended my LinkedIn profile description and other personal bios with this audacious statement: My ultimate objective is to reinvent the novel — along with the very acts of reading and writing — through new media technologies. [I’ve recently taken it off LinkedIn, but it’s memorialised in my Oxford Internet Institute profile.]

My audacity had two parents. The mother was HackLondon 2015, the first-ever student hackathon in London (and the first hackathon I ever attended). It was here that I came up with #TwitterNovel, a crowdsourced story narrated with the help of Twitter hashtags. I met development and design wizards who helped me bring this vision to life. We were ineligible for any of the official awards because we didn’t use any sponsor APIs. But we won a spontaneous prize from the lead judge — the inimitable Mischa Dohler. He even wrote about us on his blog.

This emboldened me to submit an application for a new entrepreneurship programme run by Saïd Business School a few weeks later: the Venture Idea Exploration Workshop. Under the mentorship of startup experts, I developed and tested the business idea behind #TwitterNovel over eight weeks, culminating in a pitch to investors. I worked with two incredible programmers to build an alpha version of the platform, which was rebranded as Hashnovel. We attracted a lot of attention and excitement, especially after the pitch — it literally enacted the platform. But ultimately my DPhil got in the way of Hashnovel becoming a self-sustaining reality.

What I didn’t realise until recently was that I didn’t need to invent a new platform to reinvent narrative. I could achieve my objective by leveraging existing platforms in novel ways (pun completely intended). The building blocks already exist, and there are enough to replicate the Great Wall of China. Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, MixCloud, Jupyter Notebook, GitHub, TikTok, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, Google Documents, Slack, Gmail, Spotify, Vimeo, Airtable, Notion: these platforms, and more, will all be part of this narrative. Medium is not my only medium.

So here I am. And here you are.

Please stay a little longer?

Who are you?

Let’s stop talking about me. Let’s start talking about you.

Who are you? Why have you clicked?
Why are you (still) here?
What are you thinking? What are you feeling?
What do you know? What don’t you know?
What do you care about? What don’t you care about?
What do you expect from me?

If you feel audacious enough, I invite you to submit your response(s) to the above questions through the form below. In return, I will read every word you write. I will relish every syllable, every comma, every whitespace. I will use your responses to shape future Chapters, and might even quote you in one of them.

And because words can only take us so far:

Talking is overrated.

Before we talk about talking, we have to talk about listening — and understanding, and empathy. We have to talk about the audience.

If you don’t think about your audience before you communicate, you are not communicating. You are delivering a monologue. [I don’t know about you, but the only monologues I have time for are those from Shakespeare and Tennyson.]

Listening is a two-way street: you have to listen to your audience, and you have to do everything possible to get your audience to listen to you.

Up until my 20s, I respected and admired people who could speak. I thought the most powerful person in the room was the person with the strongest voice and the fanciest rhetorical flourishes. The epicentre of attention, the soul of the party.

Now I respect and admire people who can listen. The most powerful person in the room is often the person who speaks the least. That is the person I want to engage with, the person I am the most curious about. Because that is the person who has done the most listening.

Let’s face it — talking is overrated. There are so many courses on public speaking, presenting, debating. There are not nearly enough courses on listening, understanding, empathy-building. And there are even fewer courses that blend these two skills (which is why they are often mutually exclusive when exercised).

Without listening, speaking has no power. Content, style, and structure must come after the audience is considered (the context must be considered too, but I don’t want to dilute the focus of this Chapter). The very first thing you should think about when communicating is who you are speaking to — not what you have to say, or how you are going to say it. This allows you to be proactive, not reactive.

Ask yourself the questions that I asked above: who is my audience? What does my audience already know? What don’t they know? What do and don’t they care about? What are they expecting from me?

If you tell your audience what they already know, at best you come across as uninteresting, and at worst you come across as condescending (unless you innovate on delivery — but let’s save that for another Chapter). If you talk to your audience about a topic they’re not interested in, you might as well be talking to a cement wall.

And for as long as your communication lasts, you should keep your audience front and centre. If you’ve lost their attention for whatever reason, do everything you can to win it back. Sing and dance if you have to. Scream, shout, wave your hands about. Because if you don’t recover your audience’s attention, there is literally no point in your communication. In fact, it might become counterproductive.

I mean this in every communication context — whether it’s a public speech, a work meeting, or a banter with friends. The size of the audience does not matter.

Listening is only the first step. It does not guarantee understanding. However, without listening, understanding is impossible. And most of us fail at the listening step.

When there is understanding, something magical happens: pathos. Common feeling. Sympathy and, in much rarer cases, empathy. In the words of one of my students: ‘Only when the other person feels like you understand them will they be open to critical and productive and nonjudgemental discussion.’

At this point, the arc of distortion is as close to zero as it could possibly be. Cue Pachelbel’s Canon.

Why is listening so damn difficult?

I’m sure you’ve heard variations of the above before. I’m sorry for repeating what you already know. I hope I haven’t come across as condescending.

It all sounds so simple — but why is it so difficult in practise?

There are four main reasons.

Firstly, when we speak, we instinctively think about ourselves — our wants, our needs, our feelings. The ego dominates. It’s just human nature. It happens to the best of us. It’s called self-preservation.

And in fact, the older we grow, the less we listen. This is so important that I will say it again more boldly: the older we grow, the less we listen. Children are better communicators than adults. Why? They carry less baggage with fewer strings attached. They have far smaller egos — and thus far less to lose. ‘Reputation’ hasn’t yet crept into their vocabulary.

Secondly, we assume the worst in other people. We hardly ever give people the benefit of the doubt. We hold each other up to impossibly high standards. If circumstances are unfavourable and something goes wrong, we immediately blame the person, not the circumstances.

Our tendency to assume malicious intent in others is magnified beyond belief when there is a lack of communication. The introduction of email read receipts and their equivalent tick marks on messaging platforms has taken this to a whole new level. ‘OMG. They were last on WhatsApp at 9.32am, they’ve seen my message, it’s now 10.24am, and they haven’t yet replied… OMG they are active on WhatsApp now and they still aren’t replying. They must be deliberately ignoring me!’ We’ve all been there, thought that.

Why do we assume the worst in other people? Because it makes us feel better about ourselves.

I had a work colleague who would literally roll her eyes every time I spoke and every time she tried to communicate something that I didn’t understand. Rather than acknowledge that she could provide a better explanation, she used her body language to put the blame on me. Her expression communicated it all: ‘The fact that you don’t understand this means you’re an idiot. And I can’t be bothered to explain it to you.’

Thirdly, as harsh as we are on other people, we are even harsher on ourselves. This point supplements the first point: the ego dominates, and it is fragile. We think about ourselves before others because we don’t trust ourselves. How many times have you overplanned a presentation? And because of this overplanning, found it difficult to stray from your carefully crafted narrative and PowerPoint slides in order to react, real-time, to the audience?

Why don’t we trust ourselves? Because we lack self-confidence.

Why do we lack self-confidence? Because everyone around us tells us we’re not good enough. Because Instagram. Because LinkedIn. Because parents. Because news media. Because leadership. Because society. Because impossible standards. Because failure isn’t discussed or celebrated nearly as enough as it should be.

The fourth factor is a difficult one to face: we don’t listen to people we don’t like. To make matters worse, our judgements about others are fuelled more by ‘gut feeling’ than by deep thinking. Heuristics are our best friend. We might like or dislike someone simply because they wear horn-rimmed glasses (how stylish/hipster), or use the word ‘betwixt’ in their Twitter bio (how charming/archiac), or went to Harvard (how intelligent/pretentious). Our perception of them colours everything they do and say.

The consequences are, of course, significant. Take just one example from Richard Chataway’s The Behaviour Business: it takes hours to interview candidates for a job, but the average hiring decision is made in 20 seconds. That’s how long it takes to judge whether or not you like someone.

So forget the message. Even the most ‘objective’ statement in the world can be perceived as subjective. Positivity can be framed as negativity. Humility as arrogance. Praise as critique. Jokes can be taken far too seriously. It doesn’t matter what your words are.

Forget the message, and focus on knowing your audience. Inside and out, ideally. If you don’t, you are taking a massive risk. It could cost you your relationship. It could cost you your job. It could cost you your reputation.

And this is why communication is a science. You can’t know your audience inside and out, most of the time. Audiences are always changing. Not everyone will like you. Not everyone will listen to you. You will fail, over and over and over again. And you will fail some more.

But if you fail systematically and strategically — if you pay close attention to what went wrong, and analyse why — you will succeed in future experiments. And you may even be able to repeat this success. No money-back guarantees, though.

How can we become better listeners?

Let me answer this question with an anecdote.

I once failed an initial interview for what appeared to be a dream job because of my response to the first question. It was quite broad, and thereby quite dangerous given my overenthusiasm: ‘Tell me what you think this company does, and why you’re interested in the role.’

My passion for both the company and the role led me right into a communication trap. I spoke for five solid minutes.

Nothing was wrong with my answer on a content level — I was perfectly eloquent and included a wide range of relevant details. But everything was wrong with it on an audience and context level.

My interviewer’s immediate response: ‘I’m going to have to rush through the rest of my questions because we’ve lost too much time on this one.’

We only had 30 minutes, and he had mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that he had to hop onto another call directly afterward.

Needless to say, despite the fact that my background matched the job description perfectly, and the fact that the other questions went very well, I was not summoned back for a second interview.

What I should have done: a) deliver a 30-second elevator pitch response, b) provide the interviewer with an opportunity to ask a follow-up question, and c) observe his facial expressions. In short, I should have made my point succinctly, let him talk more, and listened more.

Follow-up questions have a double advantage. They allow the listener to not only explicitly demonstrate their interest in what you are saying, but also have more agency in the conversation. As discourse analysts would put it, they increase the frequency of turn taking. They are especially effective in contexts in which time is limited.

I was fortunate to have the ability to observe the interviewer’s facial expressions, as we were on a video call. Unfortunately, given my extreme focus on the details of my answer, I did not focus on his reactions. Had I been more attentive, I might have stopped talking sooner. I might have noticed his impatience and frustration — or at the very least, his lack of a positive reaction.

Body language is the richest form of communication, because it betrays our emotions and attitudes. It is far more authentic than the words that come out of our mouths — and indeed, is often at odds with these words. So much is communicated through our eyes alone. Our eyebrows, mouths, hands, and overall posture also convey universes of meaning.

The best listeners I know have the highest levels of emotional intelligence. They can decipher and respond to microexpressions in real time — subtle changes in our demeanour that reveal a core emotion. Changes so subtle that even we aren’t fully aware of them: a widening of the eyes, a furrowing of the brow, an upward curve of the lips.

Emotion is the most universal language. Every culture in the world expresses anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise in the same way. Darwin first proposed this, and Paul Ekman has proven him right. Emotion is so important to communication that I am dedicating all of Chapter Three to it.

If you cannot see your audience, ask your audience questions and gauge their tone. That is the next best thing. Even better: ask the audience to tell you what they’ve heard. If they are super vague, they haven’t listened or they haven’t understood.

If you are speaking to a large audience, get as much Q&A in as you can. Use polls. Use the chat function if you’re on a virtual platform. Even better, a collaborative whiteboard.

And if you are truly fearless, consider prerecording your talk and making the entire live event a Q&A. This is what the Wonder Women & Rebel Girls workshop organisers did when they decided to go fully virtual. And it was a smashing success.

If no questions are asked, there is a very high chance that you’ve lost your audience. Was it something you said? Absolutely.

Let me end this section with three higher-level reflections:

Recognise that we all have different mental schemata, and that we all speak our own idiolects. So it is very important that we define key terms upfront: what we mean by them, and what we don’t mean. The more specialised a word is, the safer it is — few would quibble over the definition of deoxyribonucleic acid. Ironically enough, the word ‘communication’ is particularly contentious.
When you next speak to someone you dislike, try to focus more on the context and less on the person. Think about the circumstances outside of their control. Think about their incentives. Think about the people they have to please (their stakeholders), the goals they have to meet, the deadlines they are under. Think about what information they know and where it comes from. Recognise that you have the power to make it less personal.
Before you speak, ask yourself this: ‘How will what I am about to say make my audience feel?’

Finally, recognise that listening is not always possible. There are some situations that are truly out of our control. Listening is impractical especially if values are misaligned, or power dynamics are at play — it is a well-known fact that those who have power are incentivised not to listen. In these situations, it is best to keep the conversation as positive and as brief as possible. We can’t win them all.

Is the internet making things worse?

This is a terrible question. The short answer is that the internet makes things better and worse in equal measure. Its net effect is ambiguous.

As a wise philosopher called Epictetus once said, ‘We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.’ But in the information age, two ears and one mouth are not enough — we should be endowed with infinite ears and no mouth.

We are drowning in communication. We consume content in endless feeds designed to keep us scrolling. It gets even better on music and video platforms: we don’t have to select what to consume next because autoplay is the default. Even if you turn it off, it automatically turns itself back on again.

How convenient. What a seamless user experience. Who doesn’t value these things? Well, for a start, the man who invented infinite scroll.

But more on design in a future Chapter. The main point I’d like to make here is that thanks to this overabundance of content, we can get an almost 360° view of our audience. We know what they are thinking, what they are feeling. What they like and dislike. What they know and don’t know. We can find our tribe. There is an app for every microcommunity — even, as I’ve recently learned, fruitarians.

That’s the good news. The bad news: tribes taken to the extreme result in echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation. Communication is a little too personalised, especially in political and marketing contexts (microtargeting). The internet is a silent disco: although we’re surrounded by other people, we’re all singing and dancing to our own music. We are alone, together. For those without an audience, capturing views and clicks is insanely difficult because of a) the sheer volume of competition and b) the fact that algorithms favour the most popular content (it’s a classic #richgetricher situation).

The mixed news: the information age is the Age of the Audience. Audience feedback is more measurable and influential than ever before. It has unlocked new business models: TripAdvisor, Yelp, TrustPilot. It powers the shared economy: Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, BlaBlaCar. It directly influences the products we buy (Amazon), the films we watch (IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes), the companies we apply for (Glassdoor). Comments on content are often more entertaining and enlightening than the actual content itself.

These reviews and comments constitute a new category of content. But consuming it is not straightforward. Fake reviews and trolls abound. We, as individuals and organisations, have to learn how best to respond, and when not to respond. We need to know which reviews can actually be trusted, ironically enough.

Our standards for trust have changed. They are higher, but also more easily manipulated because the stakes are so significant. They can make or break an organisation.

This is exactly where communication science comes in. What we need are frameworks that will help us think more critically, not black and white answers. Because audience feedback is multicoloured. And new colours are being invented all the time.

What did my audience say about Chapter One?

I have deliberately taken some time to publish Chapter Two, because I have been gathering and digesting feedback about Chapter One.

The overarching reaction to Chapter One was extremely positive. There were, however, people who commented without taking the time to read it (this happened almost exclusively on Twitter). Here are some of their reactions:

These reactions do not surprise or irritate me at all (although the second one is especially ironic). In fact, they only add more fuel to my Communication Revolution fire — they demonstrate the severity of our communication problem. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: communication is broken, in every single domain. We need look no further than the Twitterverse.

The fact that people share articles they have not read does not concern me. What does concern me is that people publicly share their comments about articles they have not read — and these comments get reshared.

These comments are often TL;DR summaries. They often misrepresent the core messages of the article. They are designed to be provocative and performative — to make the commentator look smart, at the expense of the author of the article. Again, it’s all about ego.

And when that commentator is Scott Adams and the author barely uses Twitter, the TL;DR summary gets orders of magnitude more attention than any summary tweeted by the author.

But hey, any publicity is good publicity… right?

And now I must apologise twice. Firstly, for using such a provocative title for Chapter One — I was taking a calculated risk, and I know it offended some of you. Secondly, for misleading you in the title of this section. I have described my pseudoaudience: those who hadn’t read Chapter One, but commented as if they had. I have not described my real audience.

Who is my real audience?

It would be apropos to conclude this Chapter by celebrating those who have taken the time to properly digest Chapter One. The members of the #CommunicationRevolution. The people for whom I write.

I’m delighted to have reached data scientists and communication coaches. Students and teachers. Linguists and marketers. Writers and journalists. And professionals from so many fields: healthcare, performance athletics, and human resources, to name but a few.

Chapter One not only allowed me to connect with new faces, but also gave me an excuse to reconnect with familiar ones. Here are some of the brilliant minds who read and responded:

Cate Hamilton—language education expert and entrepreneur. She had me at her tagline ‘Let’s talk about talking’ (and her stunning red hair). Several tweets and DMs later, we were on a Zoom call. We talked for hours about 21st-century talking, and recorded one of these hours for her Language Revolution podcast. Here’s Part One, and here’s Part Two. Cate is also the co-founder of Babel Babies, the publisher of an anthology of voices on multilingualism, and the mother of three children. I don’t know how she does it.
Elizabeth Stokoe — Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University, Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for REF, creator of the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM). She is the reason Cate and I found each other on Twitter! We’re speaking properly on Zoom soon. It’s going to be very meta… she’s literally written a book on the science of conversation.
Oliver Logan—co-founder of Movement and Skill Acquisition Ireland (MSAI), Analysis Lead for British Swimming, biomechanist, movement scientist. On the surface level, we have no interests in common and our networks don’t overlap (I am in fact terrified of swimming). But thanks to LinkedIn, we connected and had an incredibly resonant call about Chapter One. We spoke about theories of ecological psychology, perception-action coupling, and the influence of the Industrial Revolution on learning (like production lines, education is ‘linear reductionist’ because it seeks to maximise efficiency).
Iain Overton — investigative journalist, human rights campaigner, author of books on suicide bombers and guns, Executive Director of Action on Armed Violence, filmmaker. Iain actually connected with me a year ago due to my research on Brexit bots, but the timing wasn’t right back then for a proper conversation. He has inspired me to finally get cracking on a book proposal. It’s now or never.
Sarah Hawley — Head of Employee Communications at Salary Finance, and one of the most exceptional communication professionals I’ve ever met. She has a sky-high EQ, and speaks Mandarin far more fluently than I will ever do. I’m extremely lucky to have her as a work colleague. Needless to say, we’re always talking about comms! She is also indirectly responsible for the Scott Adams tweet above, as her partner tweeted Chapter One at him.
Sean Buchan — digital communications specialist and activist for social, environmental, and political change. I interviewed Sean for my DPhil research in 2017, as he directed the agency that spearheaded the We Are Europe campaign’s digital strategy. (They are the creative geniuses behind the Trump-Boris kiss mural in Bristol.) Sean has recently made his own Medium debut, and we reconnected not over Zoom, but in person two weekends ago… less than 24 hours before he flew back to Barcelona.
Ed Parsons — my former manager at Pearson Education, where he served as an executive editor for many years. Given our mutual interests in language, learning, and technology, we’ve kept in touch ever since I left Pearson in 2013, but didn’t have a call until last month. Our professional paths have converged: we’ve both ended up in product teams at software companies. But we’ve been in product teams all along: editorial is product at media companies.
Alex English — a self-proclaimed hemp professional. He discovered Chapter One through Scott Adams, and wrote the most exquisite responses on LinkedIn. We haven’t yet had a call, but when we do, I am sure the conversational sparks will be flying. And I want to learn all about hemp: what Alex calls ‘the .com of agriculture’.
David Angell — another digital marketing superstar I interviewed for my DPhil research. He directs Wordsmith Digital and is the associate director of Brand Response, Social Placement, and Torricel. He crafted the digital strategy for Nick Clegg, the first UK political party leader to join Twitter. David was also one of the first advertisers at Google, and helped carve out award-winning AdWords and Analytics strategies. Talk about trailblazer status in both the public and private sectors.

All of the above individuals, and many more, have inspired me to write this Chapter. They have shaped my words, my emotions, and my thoughts.

We are the product of our experiences. We are the average of the people we spend the most time with. The quality of my thinking and writing is directly linked to the quality of the individuals with whom I communicate. Every conversation, every interaction is important: from casual emoji-laden banter to more structured discussions over email, collaborative documents, and video platforms. It only takes one message to spark a life-changing idea.

These Chapters are writing themselves. They capture the reflections I’ve had on communication over the past decade. But these reflections were utterly useless until now, because I didn’t record them and communicate them at scale. See the irony there?

I want my audience to be as diverse as galaxies in the universe. So I shall end with a call to action: please share this Chapter. Question it, quote it, expand it. That will only encourage me to write more. If you’re tweeting, tag me (@yinneth) and include #CommunicationRevolution. I will stalk the hashtag and I will read every tweet. They will directly contribute to future Chapters. You are all part of this novel. You are all part of the Communication Revolution.

And if, like me, you’re more of a lurker on social media and would prefer to connect privately — send a message to rhetoricdoctor@gmail.com. That’s your reward for scrolling this far down the page!

Thank you, once again, for listening. Thank you for choosing this Chapter over [insert your choice of short-form entertainment here]. You are the best audience I could have asked for.