Last week, Kyeli and I were finishing up the fourth draft of the book. We were discussing what to do about one of our editors who was running late getting her comments to us, and we had an interesting miscommunication.

Kyeli said, “If she gets them to us by Friday, I’d like to look over them, but I don’t want to go through them with the expectation that we’ll merge most of the changes in like we’ve been doing with the other editors. Does that make sense?”

I replied, “Yes, totally,” and nodded.

I then went on to say, “My opinion is that I’d prefer to treat her edits just like the others, even though they’re late.”

Kyeli was confused, because she thought that I had agreed, then promptly turned around to disagree. From my perspective, I had agreed that Kyeli’s point of view made sense, not that I thought it was the best way to handle things.

We each made the usual error.

Perhaps this is a difference in communication styles between literal-minded people (like me) and figurative-minded people (like Kyeli)?

How would you have interpreted my response of “Yes, totally”?