Ilari, Indexicality & I

Posted By Duncs ~ 18th August 2013

Ilari Aegerter wrote a great post on Indexicality a while back which really piqued my interest & the impact on how I communicate as a Tester. Unfortunately, due to my slightly obsessive nature, this experiment leaked into my personal life as well…

no-pointing-finger

After reading the post & burrowing (slightly) deeper into indexicality, I realised indexicality could be responsible for a lot of the ambiguity & confusion I experience in the workplace when I’m explaining my testing & test results to others.

The post made me think of Jerry Weinbergs thoughts about what the saying “It Works” actually means (better reference pending…)

So I tried out a little experiment - Basically, I’ve tried to stop using any indexicals (& derivatives there of such as demonstatives & deixis).

So far the results have “proved” positive in that people I’m conversing with seem to understand me “better” & those instances where I accidentally used an indexical in conversion required further explanation. I haven’t actually got any qualitative stats for this indexical experiment.

Here are examples of some of the words I have tried to stop using:

This
That
Those
It
There
Here
Later
Soon
Earlier
Then
We
Them
Us
They
Him
Her
His
Hers

Similarly, when other people, such as fellow testers, use indexical words in conversation with me, I ask them to qualify their statements. For example “It worked earlier” when reporting a bug. What worked? When did it work? How did it work? How is not working now?

The experiment is not all plain sailing though. It’s a fine line between removing unnecessary indexcals & keeping communication brief - check the sentence above as an example! I’m still working on this balance & I guess I will be for some time yet.

Have you thought of the potential problems & indexicality? Have you tried the experiment yourself? Let me know your thoughts!

Thank you Ilari - I appreciate you giving me the tools to start this indexical journey!

Duncs

P.S. I know the title should be “Ilari, Indexicality & Me”, but that doesn’t have the same tenuous alliteration does it?!

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  • Helena Jeret-Mäe

    I’m more at home with the term “deixis” from my studies at the university.

    We got drilled and disciplined in the use of deixis in our essays… So I know how it feels like trying to get rid of vaguness and how to scrutinize the text.

    I have done the same for the testers on my team: I have scrutinized their bug reports to show and explain them where unclarity comes from. Then we have discussed how to make the sentences better.
    I always take note when a tester starts explaining something using a LOT of “it”, “this”, etc. I’ve found it may be due to (still) unclear understanding of a problem, “laziness”+cockiness, being in a hurry and such. So yeah, this is the moment to crack down and say “Huh? What do you mean?”.

    On the other hand, it’s not like you have to get rid of the use of deixis in general. As you yourself pointed out, it’s a fine line (the only thing I found wrong with the sentence was the missing apostrophe - otherwise the reference is clear in my opinion). So we need them in order to avoid repeating nouns (or longer noun phrases) because the text can become oversaturated with the phrases and we don’t always have an alternative (or it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time figuring out an alternative).

    Also, in case of English there are occasions when you must use “there” or “it” in order to construct a sentence (in which case these words don’t act as deixis). This may be a bit too obvious but I wanted to point it out nevertheless. In English the sentence always has to have a subject but under some circumstances you need a “placeholder” when you don’t have the actual subject. Therefore, you have to say “it is raining” or “there are clouds in the sky”.

    In my opinion and experience, it boils down to something simple: do not let your deixis wander far away from the original idea; make sure that your deixis retains the connection to the intended idea and won’t get pulled towards some other idea in the proximity. The latter can happen when you use several (noun) phrases in your sentence. In this case, references such as “the former” and “the latter” may help :)

    I have found that you can’t really use deixis effectively across multiple sentences anyway, so typically you would have a sentence where you use a noun or a noun phrase, then use deixis in the following sentence.

    … and I’ll stop before my comment becomes longer than your blog post :)

    • DuncanNisbet

      Wow - what a fantastic response! thank you for taking the time to share!

      Your comment on indexicality & deixis in the context of testing has really helped me understand the concepts better & given me some further avenues to explore.

      I really appreciate your help with defining the “fine line” as well - that was a very grey area for me (thank’s for the typo correction as well!).

      When it comes to discussing the English language, nothing for me is obvious (even as a native speaker!). This lack of clarity is becoming more apparent as I work with many different multi-nationals - I’m really having to listen to the way I speak as I sometimes use colloquialism which in itself brings another level of ambiguity :-)

      Thanks again Helena,

      Duncs

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  • James Thomas

    Duncan, if you’re interested in restricting language in the pursuit of clarity, have you come across E-Prime?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime says:

    Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. For example, the sentence “the film was good” could not be expressed under the rules of E-Prime, and the speaker might instead say “I liked the film” or “the film made me laugh”. The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker’s experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact.

    • DuncanNisbet

      I hadn’t heard of E-Prime - thanks for the heads up James. E-Prime combined with Helena’s information on linking words & deixis is really going to help me drive out the ambiguity in my conversation.

      (also, thanks for the link on Helena’s blog to your post on modal-driven-development)