Are Written Communications Easier Than Speech - How Common?

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I may have a way around it now. I can easily let him see me standing on my balcony whenever he follows the path next to my building. If he shows that he is still as happy to see me as before (and Aspies don't forget) then it would be easy to just drop a note to him walking along below. Yesterday I verified that he does indeed walk the tracks (at least he does not walk the other way and there are only two ways to get to where he arrives). There is a new issue now though that needs time to get worked out. Wednesday he arrived with an obvious red mark across his forehead and a bruise on his cheek. Since then his family has been spending a lot of time with him. I think he got beat up at school and is having an emotional crisis over it now. It just breaks my heart to think that anybody could harm such a nice guy as this and I really do wish I could help, but at this point I can only watch and wait for him to recover.

I find written communication much easier than vocal. I think because it gives me more time to organize my thoughts and make them coherent. I can do vocal but I find it difficult to think and speak at the same time so either I have lots of pauses or my thoughts come out untelligelible. I have memorized scripts I use for common conversation that gets me by fairly well.

My writing reflects who I am better than when I speak.
Also if I want to learn something new...it is better that I read it, then hear it rather than hear it for the first time and try to understand.
When someone is talking to me, expecially on an unfamiliar subject, it kinda sounds like the teacher on charlie brown cartoons...."wa, woop,waa,wamp, wa, woo,wap" or I just get lost in a sea of words without meaning to them struggling to understand what they are saying like a person fighting against a verbal rip current. But in writing, both in comunicating to and fro, it is crystal clear. I suggest that if your friend has trouble with writing but can read...maybe you can learn sign language and teach him. Sign language breaks communication barriers for those severely impacted by autism's language processing problems. I was taught sign language at 11 years old and I started learning how to communicate with people...before then, I could not understand how to communicate....I liked to play with other kids but could not carry on a conversation with anyone until about 3 years after learning sign language.

Writing: Difficult and time consuming, but effective.

Speech: Mush easier, but much less effective.

Written communication, for me, is not easier than speech, but it is far more effective.

I can talk anybody's ear off if they sit long enough, and I lock the door on them. But that's just me thinking out loud, which I do all the time. Drives my wife utterly batty.

If I want to communicate something important though, I have to do it in writing, which is much much harder for me, because I'm a very slow and very sloppy writer, and a slow typist as well. In the end though, if I write, my thoughts are less apt to be misunderstood. It still happens, but nowhere near as often with writing.

To me the two are entire opposites. Does the average person see them as the same, and is proficient at them both evenly?

The average person is dilussioned to sense them as the same,hence his insnesitive self confidence which results at the average use of both channels in a way which is unaware of the context of time and space and that's that's why the croocked ones are so anxius to bend the straits.
The awarness of this 2 channels as bilonging to different or even conflictiong "inertias" stands behaind many the AS traits and choices and since the average man can not sense the "paradoxes" of time and space we look as completly unreasonable to him,
and for that matter there is no much difference between a trained pro,concerned parent or the local bully,
the are all equally blind to the way we sense reality and to the reasons that drives us.

If he was happy to see you before, then it stands to reason, since you have done nothing to harm him, that he will be happy to see you again, whether he shows it or not. If he's in emotional crisis, it may even be more difficult to show. I would personally go ahead and give him the note inviting more communication, then let him respond in his own time. But, of course, that's just me.

I much prefer writing to speaking.

This brings up an interesting point that I have been curious about for a long time. I have better vocal skills than he does, but when it come to using facial expressions and hand gestures, he is far more expressive than I am. I really do wish I could do that myself. I will usually respond to people with my same stone cold sober gaze even if it does not reflect what I really feel. Apparently at some time in the past, he has been given some kind of training to show his feelings in this way to compensate for the Aspie tendency to be as unresponsive as I am. When you begin to speak to him though, it is almost as if somebody flipped a switch and he becomes deeply focused on your words as I mentioned before with that same gaze that I have. If he can ever learn to harness that extremely deep focus constructively (and he may have already learned this... I don't know) then there is no limit to what he might be able to accomplish in life. What I have never understood is whether his extreme happiness to see me was real, or if it was only an overcompensation to avoid the Aspie trait of unresponsiveness. The one thing that I do know is that I have never seen him show this same apparent happiness towards anybody else. This will only be answered if I can ever really get to know him.

Yes!! ! S Writing is easier. Sometimes, I cannot stop in written form. In person, verbal interaction is torture, and little comes out and with lots of "originality in expression..." Ahem.... And, thank you to everyone who shared that this is an Aspie thing. I feel better knowing there are many others out there like me. I am not weird (okay, no, I am weird, and I like it that way) or alone (but, lonely, like so many others, too). Thank you!! I feel better just reading this today.

Writing is easier, though neither is easy.

Speech just feels like a lot of heavy equipment that takes a lot of energy to turn on.

I.e. As I've gotten older it's gotten so I can't seem to drive and speak at the same time (without endangering lives, anyway). If I try to say something, before I even get a word out I'll suddenly notice that the car has drifted completely into another lane, and I didn't "see" it happening at all. And when I was working, keeping the verbal language part of my brain "spooled up" (ready for use/response at any moment) was a significant drain (though I didn't realize how much at the time).

Getting older and having less energy has actually made it easier to sort some things out -- what is "not trying hard enough," from "this really is a bigger load than normal."

so, so much easier to communicate by writing. I don't know your neighbor but I know the behavior he exhibits as well as I know myself, because I act similarly. In fact I have a list of pre-programmed responses to everyday questions designed to make people go away with as little conversation as possible. Conversation with strangers and co-workers is usually a cause of great anxiety for me...

The thing I must always be careful about when driving are all the signs of all kinds surrounding me. This includes road signs, license tag numbers, bumper stickers and all of the signs plastered all over tractor trailers. I will instantly obsess on the text or numbers, wonder if what I remember is what it really says and suddenly my attention is riveted to such text as I focus on it and extract every bit of meaning and pattern I can find from it. I must consciously realize that I am doing this, intentionally tear myself away from my obsession and turn my focus back to my driving. Its kind of like the story of the monkey driving a car.

I read this story years ago in a Florida newspaper and it was reportedly true. It seems that there was some guy in Florida who had a monkey that he taught how to drive a car. This was a challenge because of a monkey's natural tendency to become distracted (kind of Aspie like, isn't it?) rather than to concentrate on the road ahead. So he trained the monkey to ignore everything around him and to focus his attention entirely on the road ahead. One day this man was driving up I-95 along the east coast of Florida, which is a very long and monotonous drive. He got tired and wanted to take a nap so he put the monkey in the driver's seat, went to sleep and headed on up the road with the monkey driving. After a while, other motorists began to take notice of this monkey driving a car up the expressway and began calling the report into the state police. At first the cops thought it was a prank call until they began getting a bunch of these reports so they sent a car out to check it out. Sure enough, they did find this car being driven up the road by a monkey and turned on their light and siren to try to stop him. Well, the man had trained the monkey well and that monkey just followed his training and totally ignored everything that was going on around him, including the cops lights and siren while driving the car on up the road. The cops kept on chasing this monkey for something like a hundred miles, but that monkey just would not pull the car over to the side of the road. Finally the sleeping man who owned the monkey woke up and got the monkey to stop the car. The cops gave him a ticket, but when he went to court about it, the judge could not find anything to charge him with. It seems that in the state of Florida there is no law saying that a monkey cannot drive a car. He could not charge him with driving without a license either because in the state of Florida there is also no law saying that a monkey must have a license to be able to drive a car. The judge let the man go after making him promise that he would not allow his monkey to drive a car again. This is supposedly a true story, but whether it actually is or not is beyond me. It could be though... and it does describe Aspie driving behavior rather well.

what PAPERTIGER said.

funny thing, the viet cong used to play paper tiger over a loudspeaker all night long. the horror, the horror.
played it over and over and over and over................

Verbal communication much, much harder than written. I'm much better than I was as a child when I could hardly speak at all but verbal communication is still so hard I am prone to meltdowns if the topic is important or heated in any way.

This can go both ways.

Typically, I find written communication easier for me to say what I mean and avoid saying things I should not say.

However, I'm amazed at how some people will expect you to literally "read between the lines" and understand something they did not put to writing but somehow you should have gotten that message from what was written.