"Does Not Follow"

A wrinkle in communication

I keep having this experience in conversations and on internet message boards. Someone starts a conversation, and then someone follows that with a comment, but the follow-up doesn’t appear to connect with the initial conversation at all. There’s a Latin term for this non-sequitur which means “does not follow.” If you watch young children, their conversations often include a lot of this. They are talking, but it is mostly taking turns sharing stories. “I went to the park” is followed by “I have a big puppy” and this is totally normal.

This experience always bugs me, because on the one hand, it feels very rude to not follow the flow of a conversation. Someone took the time to say something. You should respond to what they have said or add on to it. When you interject with something that doesn’t connect, it sounds as though you thought what you had to say was more important than the thought they offered in the first place. Like a person who brings their own main course to a dinner invitation, it looks like you don’t want what the person is offering. That just feels rude.

But I also recognize that sometimes non-sequiturs are a sign of poor communication. If I have said something that was confusing or difficult to understand, the comment the person follows with may tell me that I haven’t been understood. In that case the follow up isn’t rude, but I have been rude by not being clearer or not trying to help the other person understand.

As with so many things, it depends on the situation. I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks, and I think it’s polite in conversation to connect what you are saying to what the other person is saying. So when a follow-up doesn’t connect, it can either be the speaker’s rudeness for being unclear, or it can be the listener’s rudeness for not crafting a fitting response. In either case, the non-sequitur itself doesn’t assign blame, it just shows a breakdown in the process of conversation.

I originally wanted to write about this because I was grumpy about the listener side of things, but it has been a good opportunity to think about how clear my own writing and speaking. To be honest it’s something I could work on.