NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct, 7 – Perhaps, the greatest thing that scientists and technical people have ignored is the responsibility they owe society to share the knowledge and skills that they have acquired over the years.
And they can share this knowledge, and skill when they take the trouble to learn the knowledge and skills required for effective communication.
Most scientists have, however, ignored this responsibility to society. Most of them suffer from the delusion that scientific and technical material or information cannot be understood by laypeople; that only fellow scientists can understand them.
But fellow scientists don’t in fact need this knowledge. It is the laypeople who, more than anybody else, need that knowledge for making personal decisions, and also for shaping opinions or policies.
Scientists need to disseminate their new ideas, new innovations, new techniques, and processes to those who need them. They cannot disseminate this without engaging in communication, in writing, and in speaking in public forums.
Writers or professional communicators know that there is nothing under the sun that cannot be understood so long as one man/woman understands it. Scientific and technical material can be made accessible to laypeople so long as the possessors of this special knowledge have burnt the midnight oil learning how to communicate; to share ideas.
The principle of scientific and technical writing and speaking as much applies to all non-fiction writing and speaking.
“It is the principle of leading readers(audience) who know nothing, step by step, to grasp of subjects they didn’t think they had an aptitude for or were afraid they were too dumb to understand,” William Zinsser, an American Writer, and teacher observes in his book, On Writing Well.
The greatest mediators or conveyors of the ideas and innovations that scientists generate are journalists. Most professional journalists have a social science background. They don’t have the background in hard sciences and technology to be able to readily understand the latest scientific reflections and ideas that scientists have generated.
The scientist communicating scientific and technical knowledge and information wishing to disseminate his ideas to the general public and to the opinion and policymakers through media has an obligation to be understood. This is critical if he/she wants his/her ideas understood, packaged, and disseminated or broadcasted by the print and electronic media.
He/she has no option, for effective and widespread dissemination of his/her ideas to make his communication concise, coherent, and simple as far as possible. But this cannot be done when the scientist has the right attitude, the subject matter, the process of writing and speaking, but also to the audience.
The inability to communicate is a sure sign of poor education. A person is uneducated who has not mastered the elements of forcible prose and a style of speaking, writing and sharing his/her most sublime thoughts.
Granted, the formal education system may not have the wherewithal to provide the right educational and training experience to enable us to learn how to communicate effectively. Perhaps, the only place where an effort is made to teach people how to communicate is in the Department of Languages, and journalism and Mass Communication. Other departments are concerned more about imparting the relevant technical knowledge and skills in those departments.
Aware of this deficiency, many private companies in the west secure Consultants in Communications to help their management trainee recruits to understand the basic rudiments of the elements of effective writing and communication. The leadership of these organizations appreciates the role of effective communication in sharing the knowledge, skills, values, capabilities, and habits of thinking that define effective organizations.
I have never heard of any organization in this country going out of its way to address the deficiencies that its new employees or top management may have.
We tend to view communication as very simple. So simple that we think anybody who has basic literacy—the ability to read and write and decipher has the skill. This is a big mistake. There is nothing more complex, more frustrating than communication. The ability to read and write and decipher is not the same as the power to read and do all that appertains to the knowledge we variously acquire in institutions of higher learning.
We cannot quantify the impact the deficiency in communication has on organizational performance. We cannot measure how much this undercuts our ability to communicate the vision, values, and goals of the organizations that manage society. We cannot measure the toll this has had in enabling people, ordinary people, to communicate new ideas, ideas that have the potential to significantly change the ideas, systems n ideas that inform public opinion and public policy formation.
It is time educated people appreciated the role of communication in the health, welfare, and growth of institutions and society in general.
The Writer is a Communications Officer at the Ministry of Education.
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