[frodetb]

I think this is a big one as well, and would go one step further and say that anyone no matter their place on the spectrum may fail at communication in this way. I bet most junior developers know what I mean, if they've sat in meetings with senior guys talking about something esoteric.

One simple trick, I think, is to avoid extensive use of pronouns. A sentence like "Because of that, it doesn't find it there" might be clear enough when you know the context, but is meaningless if you don't. Filling in "that", "it", "it", and "there" would help tremendously. It will make sentences awkward if you avoid them completely, of course, but I think sentences that contain nothing but pronouns are a red flag.

[JadeNB]

As a math teacher, I try to instill a similar idea in my students, and am glad to hear that the idea is useful in a broader range of situations!

In overstated form, my version of the idea is: “never use ‘it’”—because a student just learning mathematical language will have many different ‘it’s in mind, or, even worse, no clear idea of what ‘it’ is. (For example, I'll often see an application of the derivative summarized as “since it is negative, it is decreasing”, which is correct only if you change ‘it’s midstream—but students often don’t realize that they are, or should be, doing so.)

[robbyking]

> One simple trick, I think, is to avoid extensive use of pronouns.

I was taught this is a project management for engineers course I took when I was younger: never use language that is open to interpretation. In addition to your examples, I also see this happening in meetings when engineers say a non-sprint task will be "quick." How quick? A few minutes? A few weeks? A few quarters? As soon as we started clarifying these ambiguities we eliminated a lot of misunderstandings.