TL;DR: Specificity improves clarity, credibility, and communication.
Specificity
During interviews or when trying to understand something, it doesn’t help to speak in vague terms. The more specific and concrete someone is, the more clearly they can deliver their message.
A good gauge of sentence clarity: How many possible interpretations are there? Does the listener have a concrete picture of what’s being explained or does the listener have an array of possibilities?
Workplace Specificity
- I work at a company -> ~100.000.000 exists
- I work at a game company -> ~100.000 exists
- I work at online game company -> ~25.000 exists
- I work at online board game company -> ~1.000 exists
- I work at online Catan company -> ~5 exists
- I work at Colonist.io -> There is 1
The more specific the person goes the more clear they deliver the message.
Experience Specificity
- I managed a pipeline of automation systems -> Could be 1.000.000 things
- I managed automation pipelines for software deployments -> Could be 100.000 things
- I managed CI/CD automation pipelines for a web-based gaming platform. -> Could be 1.000 things
- I managed GitHub Actions and Docker-based CI/CD pipelines for deploying updates to an online Catan-style game -> Could be 100 things
- I managed GitHub Actions workflows that automated builds, tests, and deployments of colonist.io’s online board game, reducing release times by 40%. -> Could be 10 things
Who Uses Unclear Language
- Scammers -> They don’t want you to understand the details so they keep everything at a high level
- Liars -> Same reason as scammers
- People who didn’t do the job -> In interviews they will never go deep, they’ll stay at high level to hide the fact that they don’t understand their job
- Bad communicators -> It’s lack of skill that they need to work on
If a bad communicator does not want to be lumped into the above 3 buckets they should work on increasing the specificity of their communication.