Illustration by Brian Stauffer.

There are many ways to communicate a point of view : conversations — face-to-face or via telephone or video link — instant messaging (chat, IM), email (the last vestige of the mass letter writer), and, yes, by snail mail.

In other words, you can talk, type-talk, or write.

Which then is best for conveying a complex viewpoint, which might be business, polemic, or just a description? This is not an idle question because much business is done on the phone or at local meetings, and New Media is inexorably forcing down a conversational route.

In my own world here at Syntagma I discount anything spoken or produced in an interactive conversation. The reason is that any conversation involves the intermixing of at least two minds, two value-sets, two entrenched positions, and two emotional intelligences. If that’s not a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.

Put any group together and ask them to thrash something out and you’ll get a long transcript full of inauthentic statements. People don’t function properly in conversation mode. Go to any conference and, unless a policy has been worked out beforehand, only chaos rules. Enjoyable chaos, I agree, but not something to base business decisions on.

I was once involved with creating a document of telecom standards in the new liberalized marketplace here in the UK. This involved travelling to IBM in Portsmouth and chairing meetings between groups of experts and what we would now call “stakeholders”. My abiding memory of that job was the extent to which people changed their minds after the meeting: “I was a bit hasty, there,” being a common excuse.

When you write something, it’s a different situation. There’s only your mind involved. You’re not interacting, you’re not being thrown off your own authenticity by undigested memes coming at you from all directions. You can be yourself.

You can also be considered in your point of view, mulling over the logic of your arguments before presenting them to the world’s memepool. Spitting out unconsidered comments and suggestions may be good for “getting stuff off your chest”, but it hardly adds to the functionality of the world. Utility is always preferable to misguided self-expression, especially as the latter will be in response to others’ responses in an infinite regression.

If you’re discussing business, do it by email rather than phone or IM. Conversations are for entertainment not decision-making.

The carefully-written printed document is never going to die, as some inauthentic enthusiasts think. Have you noticed that the best blogs are written by professional writers or those with similar skills?

That’s where I add a fifth point to the four Toltec principles in my recent post, A Code for Blogosphere Conversations:

5. Always write down important business decisions or proposals, and never hold anyone to something they say.

How many wars might have been averted if that principle were universally practised?

Check out our Tech Biz Writing blog/course here.