1) Sometimes not staying perfectly focused on what you see as the main point of a conversation is not the wrong thing to do. In a meeting discussing a complex b

1) Sometimes not staying perfectly focused on what you see as the main point of a conversation is not the wrong thing to do. In a meeting discussing a complex business problem for instance, a smarter person in the room might see that the root cause of a problem you're all working on is "Problem D", whereas everybody else is focused on "Problem A". 2) Some people will always communicate poorly as worse than average communicators will always exist in nature. 3) On top of this, phones and other modern technologies provide a constant distraction for people. That average person might have appeared far more competent in a different era where they lived more in the moment and had to focus on what was in front of them rather than trying to resolve a problem as quickly as possible to go back and look at their notifications. 4) IMO, the question shouldn't be "why don't some people communicate clearly", the question should be "why does it seem like more people are communicating unclearly than before". To that I would say a combination of technical distractions as well as dropping IQs. 5) My personal life tip for both programming and interacting with people in your daily life (real-estate agents, waiters, customer-support people, plumbers, etc) is to make very simple requests without conditionals whenever possible. Everybody gets confused with words like the following: if, unless, and, or, until, when. To reduce the chance of confusion, say straightforward things to your busy waiter like "Please bring me some bread" and don't give convoluted requests like "If my appetizer or salad is ready, bring me that and my bread, but if the meal is ready, I want you to please get me my drinks first." Convoluted requests with conditionals are most often a chance for confusion.