I’ve seen a lot of people on here be teased for difficulty expressing themselves. Either people complain “you’re using big person words to describe mundane things” when they’re aiming for precision or “woah, we don’t need that damn wall of text” when they’re aiming for clarity. It’s like people just want to complain.
There are many quotes that describe this phenomenon:
“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” – Henry David Thoreau, 1857 [1]
I picked that version because it was short. In other words, it takes time to remove superfluous text, something that takes practice. Previously I found that Xitter character limit helped hone the skill.
I have written a weekly podcast article about the hobby of amateur radio for 13 years and I’ve learnt that the better you understand a topic, the more concise you can formulate your thoughts.
Einstein put it like this: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” [2]
[1] Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
[2] Source: https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings/albert-einstein-if-you-cant-explain-it-simply-you-dont-understand-it-well-enough
Long is fine, as long as it’s broken into paragraphs. I’m not gonna parse a wall of text.
I don’t think poor clarity is tightly coupled to vocabulary. Poor clarity often comes from extra words and poorly organized text.
“John walked to the grocery store”
vs
“The man known in his building, but not throughout the entire city, as John, took it upon himself to walk the winding streets of Brooklyn on foot until he reached a open storefront that sold mostly, but not exclusively, groceries”
The latter is pretty limited in vocabulary but is a mess.
People just being people, sometimes crappy-pants, sometimes a friendly nettling.
Post how you post and let the comments flow past you, around you, through you. Then post again.
A
