All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time.
theres a style i see a lot
of complicating on slack
^ communicating
where they type everything line by line
like this
not much punctuation
hardly any capital letters
never use the edit feature to correct anything
just type another line with ^ and the word you meant
and everyone sees that "Stratoscope is typing" message
the entire time
it makes me crazy
I seem to be the odd man out in some Slack teams and channels. When I write something, even on Slack, I try to write it to be read. Sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, and grammar make things easier to read.
Of course I leave out the email-style "Hi Sally," intro and "Thanks, -Mike" closing, and keep it shorter and less formal.
If I'm writing more than a sentence or two, I'll sometimes type it into a separate text editor first, just so people won't have to see that "Mike is typing" the whole time. And so I don't accidentally hit Enter and send out my half-baked draft!
I also have to admit to a prejudice: when I see consistently sloppy writing from a programmer, I start to wonder what their code is like. Do they code in a way that's quick to write, or easy to read?
To be clear, by "sloppy" I don't mean the kinds of mistakes that can be expected and forgiven from a non-native speaker. And I don't mean the casual informality that is natural for the medium. I'm talking about the barely coherent style of writing I used at the top of this comment.
The line by line stream of thought seems lazy to me. It's distracting, hard to read, and doesn't feel respectful of the reader.
It seems like you're being downvoted, but I'm right there with you. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the middle of a thought only to receive a "Hi, can I ask you a question?" message, followed by 30 seconds of "X is typing...".
Part of my job is answering questions. The answer to "can I ask you a question?" therefore is always "Yes". All you manage to accomplish by asking me if you can ask me a question is to break my concentration and waste my time until your actual question comes through (often one line at a time as well).
I have to assume this is coming from people who are not good text communicators in general because the same problem exists with email: "when would you like to schedule this" without indication of your own schedule is one such pet peeve. It's really easy to stretch out asynchronous conversation by wasting the other person's time.
"I have a question" in speech DOES have a purpose, which is to prime listeners to enter conversation mode instead of stopping you to say "what" after you've said two words. Of course, I've seen people who are on the ball and impatient still get testy about that convention.
Edit: the most infuriating experience I've had in recent memory is a friend who will consistently spam his shitposts over IM without warning, but when it comes time to do business will say "hi" or "are you there" instead of asking the question.
You're entirely right about the quality of writing that comes out. I wouldn't be so quick to blame the users, though. The tools have settled on general design decisions that encourage this usage, primarily:
1. Input boxes too short to see more than a few lines of text, and of course they are not resizable.
2. Pressing <enter> sends the message, so you can't really write more than a paragraph anyway. It's usually possible to insert CRLF by something undiscoverable like shift-<enter>, but you're nervous the whole time you type it in case it sends before you're ready.
3. No spell checking.
It would be an interesting experiment to see if behavior changed much just by addressing these 3 simple items.
Ha. I would hope it would be at least a little better, like the incomplete thoughts are at least correctly spelled. But maybe the whole idea of "chat" puts the user in a frame of mind that prefers speed of writing over all else.
I think you've hit the nail on the head! People respond to the incentives they're given, and those certainly are the incentives here. Quite the opposite of an email app or a programmer's editor.
If I'm writing more than a sentence or two, I'll sometimes type it into a separate text editor first
Same! I always hop over to Sublime to do this. It'd be nice if Slack had a full screen popup focus mode where you could just write with a large text box and without UI distractions.
This definitely isn't slack-specific, and it drives me nuts as well. I've seen the same in hipchat and just about any real-time chat client in the past.
From what I've been able to tell, it's conversational, where the person types as they would speak - at the speed of thought, and others can potentially jump in (as is possible in normal conversation). This brain-dump method also seems to avoid the "x is typing..." (as fluxquanta mentioned) pause, which, if poorly implemented in some chat clients, will show "x is typing..." even if x stopped typing and stepped away. That's just as infuriating - especially if you actually need to know what x was typing.
Personally, I still prefer email. There are very few times that real-time communication has been better for me, personally, than a well-thought-out email and response chain, which I can search and reference at another time. The more a team I'm working with leans toward real-time chat, the more I find myself logging out of chat to get things done and then reviewing and responding at length when I can focus on doing so.
Comments
theres a style i see a lot
of complicating on slack
^ communicating
where they type everything line by line
like this
not much punctuation
hardly any capital letters
never use the edit feature to correct anything
just type another line with ^ and the word you meant
and everyone sees that "Stratoscope is typing" message
the entire time
it makes me crazy
I seem to be the odd man out in some Slack teams and channels. When I write something, even on Slack, I try to write it to be read. Sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, and grammar make things easier to read.
Of course I leave out the email-style "Hi Sally," intro and "Thanks, -Mike" closing, and keep it shorter and less formal.
If I'm writing more than a sentence or two, I'll sometimes type it into a separate text editor first, just so people won't have to see that "Mike is typing" the whole time. And so I don't accidentally hit Enter and send out my half-baked draft!
I also have to admit to a prejudice: when I see consistently sloppy writing from a programmer, I start to wonder what their code is like. Do they code in a way that's quick to write, or easy to read?
To be clear, by "sloppy" I don't mean the kinds of mistakes that can be expected and forgiven from a non-native speaker. And I don't mean the casual informality that is natural for the medium. I'm talking about the barely coherent style of writing I used at the top of this comment.
The line by line stream of thought seems lazy to me. It's distracting, hard to read, and doesn't feel respectful of the reader.
but maybe thats just me
It seems like you're being downvoted, but I'm right there with you. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the middle of a thought only to receive a "Hi, can I ask you a question?" message, followed by 30 seconds of "X is typing...".
Part of my job is answering questions. The answer to "can I ask you a question?" therefore is always "Yes". All you manage to accomplish by asking me if you can ask me a question is to break my concentration and waste my time until your actual question comes through (often one line at a time as well).
I have to assume this is coming from people who are not good text communicators in general because the same problem exists with email: "when would you like to schedule this" without indication of your own schedule is one such pet peeve. It's really easy to stretch out asynchronous conversation by wasting the other person's time.
"I have a question" in speech DOES have a purpose, which is to prime listeners to enter conversation mode instead of stopping you to say "what" after you've said two words. Of course, I've seen people who are on the ball and impatient still get testy about that convention.
Edit: the most infuriating experience I've had in recent memory is a friend who will consistently spam his shitposts over IM without warning, but when it comes time to do business will say "hi" or "are you there" instead of asking the question.
Oh god yes. This wastes so much time! "Oh Hi" ... 5 minutes later ... "got a sec?"
You're entirely right about the quality of writing that comes out. I wouldn't be so quick to blame the users, though. The tools have settled on general design decisions that encourage this usage, primarily:
1. Input boxes too short to see more than a few lines of text, and of course they are not resizable.
2. Pressing <enter> sends the message, so you can't really write more than a paragraph anyway. It's usually possible to insert CRLF by something undiscoverable like shift-<enter>, but you're nervous the whole time you type it in case it sends before you're ready.
3. No spell checking.
It would be an interesting experiment to see if behavior changed much just by addressing these 3 simple items.
We use a chat program with all three of those, and it doesn't fix any of those problems.
Ha. I would hope it would be at least a little better, like the incomplete thoughts are at least correctly spelled. But maybe the whole idea of "chat" puts the user in a frame of mind that prefers speed of writing over all else.
I think you've hit the nail on the head! People respond to the incentives they're given, and those certainly are the incentives here. Quite the opposite of an email app or a programmer's editor.
Same! I always hop over to Sublime to do this. It'd be nice if Slack had a full screen popup focus mode where you could just write with a large text box and without UI distractions.
This definitely isn't slack-specific, and it drives me nuts as well. I've seen the same in hipchat and just about any real-time chat client in the past.
From what I've been able to tell, it's conversational, where the person types as they would speak - at the speed of thought, and others can potentially jump in (as is possible in normal conversation). This brain-dump method also seems to avoid the "x is typing..." (as fluxquanta mentioned) pause, which, if poorly implemented in some chat clients, will show "x is typing..." even if x stopped typing and stepped away. That's just as infuriating - especially if you actually need to know what x was typing.
Personally, I still prefer email. There are very few times that real-time communication has been better for me, personally, than a well-thought-out email and response chain, which I can search and reference at another time. The more a team I'm working with leans toward real-time chat, the more I find myself logging out of chat to get things done and then reviewing and responding at length when I can focus on doing so.
I have found there is a strong correlation between people who suck at email and people who suck at realtime chat.
It appears that not many people have learned (or been taught) to value other peoples' time in regards to this sort of communication.