Frequently Not Understood.

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Do you regularly get misunderstood?(No, this isn't a rhetorical question or some sort of advert)
I do. It's got to the point where I say a sentence, and my friends are like, 'Did she speak English?' It's really annoying. I'm not talking about physical speech impairments, they just don't understand me, and today I was doing a presentation on a game I made, and _no one_ understood me. I just felt helpless. By not understood, no one knew what I was talking about. The first question I got was, 'So what actually is it?' despite the fact I obviously covered it, since the whole point of the presentation was to explain what it is...(Sorry if I'm messing up my tenses here). Even my ICT teacher didn't know a lot about what I was talking about, I could tell by the sighs and such...
Can anyone relate? I have so much information, but no one who can comprehend.
EMZ=]

I experience that all the time.

*sigh* No amount of explaining will get them to understand. You can just see their eyes glaze over as soon as you include one superflous detail. Then it's all over.

I still suffer that problem at my age. Part of the trouble seems to be judging the depth of the information to give to people. If too superficial they are easily lost. Too much detail and I'm accused of patronising them. It can also be that the people simply aren't interested in what you are talking about. As aspies we tend to know a lot about particular subjects we find fascinating and bore other people with those things.

There are some things I never even attempt to communicate to other people; words just completely fail to convey what I know and understand. So I just keep my mouth shut.

It's not even about certain subjects. I don't even try to talk about my favourite subjects because I know they don't understand, it's just when I'm responding to them, they either don't understand several words I used, or they just don't understand me full stop.
Admitedly, the presentation was about one of my favourite subjects(Computers), but even when I'm not talking about them, people just either nod and don't bother asking for me to further explain, or they make me feel weird for being too formal or something. To be quite frank, it doesn't seem very polite when all I'm doing is responding to a question. I don't see why it's so hard to say, 'Please could you say that again?' as opposed to, 'Y' WHAT...?'
EMZ=]

Ya, I come off as irrelevant or tangential at best. hard for people to follow my "line" of thoughts.

In that case, there may be more to it than you are aware. Saying something like "Y What?" may be an NT way to be scornful of you. So their language is on two levels. One is saying they don't understand what you are saying and the other may be saying they don't "relate to you". As aspies we often tend to miss levels of conversation other than the face value of the words spoken.

I've noticed this especially with women. When a woman asks if her hair looks nice never give an accurate reply. Always say it looks lovely - do you get my drift? Questions may not actually be questions.

The facial expressions they give when I say it would imply they're trying to alienate me. It feels like that anyway.
I don't know, maybe.
And people know not to ask whether they're fat or something(I know not to call people fat, I just go off topic xD).
EMZ=]

When giving presentations to "lay-people" (people who aren't so familiar with a subject you've studied in depth) I've found it's best to present the main key points only. The simpler the better. I've tried this approach to technical subjects and it does work. This simplified approach gets used a lot on science shows where only the basic summary points are presented and lots of technical "deadwood" is cut out for the sake of brevity.

What might be "obvious" to you might not be obvious to other people (I've learned this myself through bitter experience).

Maybe for future reference you could consider and think about what questions the audience asked such as "So what is it?" and answer these types of questions really clearly in future presentations. For example start with (if you hadn't already):

"This game is..."
"The aim of the game is..."

I wonder if the ICT teacher was sighing because he didn't understand the structure of the presentation or because he didn't understand the underlying technical principles behind the game?

If it's the former perhaps the information presented needs pruning. If it's the latter...well I don't know really what to suggest (if that was the case, the teacher should really have been "jumping for joy" at your knowledge!).

The point of a presentations is to get others to understand and remember the content even if it means simplifying the message and presenting the information in a more digestible form.

I've had ICT teachers who have claimed that I was trying to write a virus or crash the computer when I was writing a legitimate macro. Misunderstandings do happen!

I've also had people telling me to speak in "English" too when I am speaking in English fluently. One person suggested that I should just use single syllable words such as "cat" and "dog" so she could actually understand what I was saying . No joke.

It's a question of simplifying the content without underestimating the audience's intelligence (easier said than done!). Also different audiences require different content based on their differing levels of understanding/time constraints etc...

I hope this helps. I can't really comment on the presentation itself because I wasn't there to observe it.

I guess I could go for the simple approach, but then I'd get less marks. It was really hard to explain, because I was talking about how the servers would be rendering the 1 million or so images required when an operation is made by the account owner, and then send it back to a single image. And then the actual graphics was hard to explain.
I know my ICT teacher doesn't understand me a lot of the time(she's mistaken my CSS for HTML[even though she said I could do it in HTML, not CSS specifically]), but I think it's kind of rude to sort of dismiss my presentations.
I honestly wouldn't speak to people the way they do to me. People actually tell me to 'Okay, you can shut up now' or, 'I got it after the first 2 hours' or something when they ask me a question. I don't know, anyone else?
Thanks for the current replies and advice, I will take it on-board .
EMZ=]

I experience this quite often - even with my partner, NT, that he after sharing bed and table with me for ten years now, has difficulties in understanding what I am saying.

According to my observation this happens mostly when I develop an idea verbally and outline the idea the way it is stored in my brain and he just looses the line of arguments. An other issue is double negations, or wording like like "I would not say that can't ... " when I express an amount of uncertainty when he requests a simple "Yes" or "No", which I think would just a lie by simplification. This even sometime leads to tensions because I am accused of making issues deliberate more complex to confuse people.

Perhaps I should not run for an electoral office ...

I think the problem lies even a level deeper: NTs seems to make a difference according to situation language is used. They apply "sloppy" rules in all-day-situations and do not assume that the exact rule of logic and grammar are applied in such situations too. So they are confused when they are confronted in an all-day-situation with a strict logic language, which they may would assume in a more formal set-up.

I'm misunderstood at least twice a day. I mostly notice and just ask if I'm making sense. Actually, maybe I'm misunderstood 20 times a day and don't notice!

I am routinely not understood, or worse still misunderstood. I expect it is a rather common experience for spectrumites.

It should be a joke, but absurdly it's not.
Just one?
I had a mob of them, but they were much more generous than your "one" because they said I could use up to three syllables in a singe word.....I summarized their instructions (no long or obscure words) and they all yelled at me "there you go again". This confused me greatly and I asked what they were on about, so they told me they did not know what obscure meant... I pointed out it only had two syllables and so was well within the three syllable limit. To which they all laughed as though I were a great wit....naturally after a slight delay I laughed too.

These people were all 15 years or older and had left school. Perhaps I should have suggested they return (to school).

I've read books on how to do professional presentations. I've read simplify and summarise about a hundred times now. I guess it does depend on what you're getting the marks for. I guess some of them would be for "clarity of explanation".



I don't know. Perhaps a diagram of flow chart would help explain it?
Perhaps a "flow" or "feedback loop" of information between the user account and the server?
What kind of images? Vector, raster, 3D?



That's an entry level mistake really. She should really have kept up to date. The tags are different even if they look superficially similar. CSS is actually jolly useful for keeping consistent heading styles throughout. I've been grappling with it myself (I'm kind of on a self training course at the moment).

When I did ICT some of the teachers forgot how to plug the computer in or switch it on, so I guess things have improved since then (!)

I know this sounds like a daft question, but did you really code for that all by yourself and are you really 13?

If so wow!
I've got a lot of catching up to do...
They must be pushing you kids really hard these days.

Rendering a million images...that's light years from stuff I used to do.
The machines were so slow back then I doubt that they would have even rendered one image...

What web design package do you use?



I'm puzzled about that too.
(Unless she was jealous!?)

Or was she just bored?
I just don't understand it.

Yes.
Just one.
She also mentioned lots of other one syllable words that I should use (as you can imagine).

"You know stuff I don't." she said: "Help me!"

I'm sure I'd just said words such as the "obscure" that pandd mentioned. Nothing too complicated though. I was speaking fairly informally.

i am very eloquent in my speech (paradoxally soiled by WAY too much cursing, probably as a subconcious attempt to not come off as totally gay... ), but for all the correctness ive had what your talking about.
but more than often, i seem to talk about too random topics, or come up with observations that i find fascinating, but nobody else does, to a point where they actually tell me to shut up and stay quiet :]