Did he though?
"I'm okay" is a good start, but then maybe "there has been an accident", followed by "the car is fine" or "I hit/got hit by a bull, which is now dead".
When telling a story you want to introduce the maximum meaningful uncertainty into your telling to attract the listener into listening attentively to try to resolve it.
"The bull is dead." immediately introduces clearly important information that tells the listener they need to focus, but at the same time makes it clear that more context is needed. i.e the subtext is "listen up important details to follow".
For status reporting you want to allow the listener to stop as soon as possible to free up his/her/its limited management focus "bandwidth".
"I was in an accident, but I'm fine" would fit his paradigm better. (But would make a less notable/memorable story)
But it’s India where they are pretty big on bovines in general and their mortal status in particular.
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2567290/no-more-bull.a...
It’s possibly because you live in a location where bulls wandering on the road doesn’t ever happen, and where the author lives it does happen?
If, for example, the call was instead “I’m okay, the deer is dead”, I wouldn’t find it confusing at all.
It's actual quite ironic that a blog post about emphasizing clear purposeful communication, uses a main example that is anything but.
"The bull is dead" is indeed totally meaningless and irrelevant here. Assuming nobody else was harmed, the status of the car is the next important thing here.
It's maybe a question of perspective. His ability to consider his parents' perspective might have been somewhat limited by the fact that he was 17, it was late at night and he'd just been in a car crash which resulted in the death of a bull.
I think he did a great job and it's a great story. Glad to hear he's ok, he's lucky! RIP the bull though :(
I'm criticizing the dads ability to showcase a great example of the "right information in the right detail without going into unnecessary explanations."
And I think a big part of the authors choice of example is exactly because it is "tantalizing" - it piques your curiosity because there isn't enough information to make sense of the situation.
Starting with "I'm okay" was the right thing to do in context: an unexpected call from a child at an ominous time of day is the context, and knowledge of their safety is therefore paramount. But following it with a riddle about bulls is useless nonsense in the same context.
Putting that aside, I didnt really appreciate this either:
>Though a bit angry
Angry at your son for being in a car accident? Was this before or after finding out the reason for the accident? Where is this context and why isn't it provided in the same structure you just outlined several paragraphs earlier?
> "I'm OK, my car hit a bull."
What happened to the bull isn't the most important information; the author wants to know why his son didn't come home. Saying "the bull is dead" kind of answers that question, but only via inference ("oh, the bull must have been killed by his car"), which is why the father was initially confused.
And then "the" should be "a" because the bull hasn't been introduced yet.
It could be the case that he crashed into a farm and killed a bull and now the farmer is about to kill him with a shotgun.
Which according to the author is secondary information.
The point of the whole piece is to just get to the point. How the bull met his fate is a story, but who cares. All dad needs to know is Raj is fine.
The shorter the first sentence is, the sooner you can move onto the second sentence.
Neither party expected the conversation to end after "the bull is dead".