I’m a decent enough typist that when someone is speaking at a thoughtful pace—no word vomit, mind you—I can type their thoughts out verbatim (with plenty of typos and messy punctuation, of course).
These typing skills come in handy for one of my key job functions—extractor of information. I spend at least an hour or two every week drafting project descriptions, narratives, vision statements—that sort of thing.
My writing process usually begins by speaking with internal stakeholders, leading them along with questions and transcribing, as best I can, their winding, circuitous replies.
When I review my notes from these conversations, I am often amazed. Ideas that seemed clear and obvious when spoken out loud appear scrambled, sometimes even unintelligible transmitted onto the page.
That’s when I think back to the distinction between surface structure and deep structure:
Linguists recognize two types of language structure: surface structure and deep structure. Surface structure refers to the specific way an idea is expressed, such as the words used and their order. Deep structure refers to the gist of the idea.
Leonard Mlodinow
Surface structure can rely on nonverbal cues—tone of voice, body language—to get a point across. Remove those cues, and sometimes you are left with a muddled mess of words whose gist seems to be missing.
So: verbatim transcriptions may not always be so insightful on paper as they are in person. Now, I attempt to follow the wisdom of Mortimer J. Adler, author of the authoritative (if somewhat imposing) How to Speak, How to Listen: I try to put things into my own words rather than simply write down verbatim commentary.
Also: I try to not shy away from an essential question:
Can you repeat what you just said there?
Taylor Coe 