Clear Communication

Anthropology has the terms high-context and low-context cultures. You may be more familiar with the terms Ask culture versus Guess culture.

These days, you can search for the terms "ask culture and guess culture." My understanding is this originated with a reply on Metafilter to a question on AskMe.

Low-context culture would be Ask culture. High-context culture would be Guess culture.

It's not really that you are expected to guess the meaning. It's really that they expect you to already know a lot and be able to infer conclusions that aren't explicitly stated.

My father and ex husband were both career military. This tends to be Ask culture where you explicitly state things.

Like New York, the American military is more multicultural than most American towns and that contributes to an expectation of stating things very explicitly to avoid misunderstandings. But there are also lives on the line, so the military has a lot of protocols surrounding making sure you clearly understood what you were told.

New Yorkers get viewed as rude by a lot of people. People from Guess cultures frequently view people from Ask cultures as rude, crude and socially unacceptable.

My experience as a former military wife is some people online think I'm rude, crude and socially unacceptable and others think I'm refreshingly direct and no nonsense. This seems to have very little to do with whatever I actually said and everything to do with their expectations.

My sons likely both qualify for some kind of diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum. This means they are rather literal minded and you need to tell them things directly and not expect them to infer it.

Their default personal wiring is similar to Ask culture. Please don't expect them to Guess or infer what you are trying to delicately hint at if you want them to get up and do a thing because that isn't happening.

When they were elementary school age and taking out the trash was one of their chores, I had conversations with one of them where I would comment on the trash being overflowing and his reply was to AGREE with my accurate assessment of an obvious objective fact and NOT conclude that I was implying HE needed to do something about it.

This was crazy making and infuriating but getting mad at him and acting like he was behaving badly wasn't going to accomplish anything. I had to learn to very bluntly and explicitly TELL him "The trash is overflowing. YOU need to take out the trash NOW."

Telling cutesy anecdotes on TAGMAX about what worked with my kids sometimes had other parents telling me how stating things directly like that in language that served as clear communication with MY kids was me being bitchy, overly aggressive and verbally abusive.

I imagine most likely these were people from very sensitive upper class Guess culture backgrounds where being too blunt with the wrong person could have you ruined for life for being insulting or something. 

At the time, I hadn't yet been exposed to the concept of Ask culture and Guess culture, so I had no means to meaningfully engage with accusations that I was a TERRIBLE and abusive parent for communicating with my kids in a fashion my children very much appreciated as clear communication that made sense to them, unlike a lot of the other grown ups around them.

It made me leery of saying anything online about how I raised my kids knowing some total stranger could leap to a ridiculous conclusion that I'm an abusive parent due to actively seeking to learn to communicate in a style that works for my aspie kids.