When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of clear communication, especially in a multicultural context where language barriers exist.
James Fallows reflects on his experience living in China, highlighting the need for hyper-explicit communication when speaking or writing in English to individuals who may not fully grasp the language. This underscores the idea that assumptions about shared understanding can lead to miscommunication, particularly when cultural and linguistic differences are present. By making messages clearer, one can ensure better comprehension and avoid misunderstandings.
In practice
In a multicultural team meeting, I used this quote to stress the importance of clear communication.
For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.
The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope... Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition.
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
Every literate woman is a victory over poverty
The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
Where educators are raising and combining their voices, the seeds of positive change have emerged. Collective voice, exercised through the union, is power - the power to drive real change for our kids, families and communities.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.