“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw
Aging My Way
As a writer, one would think I would be a good communicator. After all, that’s the primary purpose of writing. And, if I might be a bit immodest, after 60 years of doing it, I think I do it quite well.
But when it comes to the spoken word, I fail quite miserably. I’m always using the wrong word, the wrong tone, or simply the wrong connotation. And it often gets me in trouble.
My brain seems to work better with my fingers on a keyboard than they do with my vocal cords. Simply put, I have foot-in-mouth-disease. My newspaper reporter colleagues used to even joke: “It’s a good thing Pat Bean doesn’t write the way she talks.”
While they might have been talking about my Texas accent, I think it went farther than that. In my defense, I always spell people’s name correctly – well after the first time I was embarrassed in print by calling someone Mary, when she actually spelled her name Mari.
After that, asking someone to spell their name was always the first question out of my mouth. And it’s a good think I did, because I discovered there were several other variations of the simple name Mary, not to mention what parents did with other supposedly common names.
I was thinking about this after coming across a bit of trivia this morning that noted there were over 7,000 languages spoken around the world. How did this come about? It’s no wonder people in this world can’t get along. They can’t understand each other.
Meanwhile, after my latest spoken communication gaff that unintentionally left some hurt feelings, I’ve decided perhaps I should spend more time writing than talking.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for the Story Circle Network Journal, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
Pat Bean's blog 
How I relate to this! as a Thinker, for me, it’s more of not realising if my words are sensitive enough before they come out and see how the recipient’s expression change or get told moments later that my words were “harsh”. We probably write better than we converse because we’re communicating with paper. The paper will never judge your sentiments, it’s an empty field from any preconceived notions. All free for us to run and enjoy it the way we desire. But I don’t think we should stop communicating either! We should definitely communicate as much as we write. I’m a firm believer that doing so will make words on paper flow better and words spoken sound better.
Hey Sis we are closer now in Roy, Utah
yup, is it an age thing? i used to do okay when speaking or communicating, but now–as you said-i do much better writing the thoughts than sharing them out loud.