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.
A if I know the vocabulary. B if I don’t.
Its all about the audience.
I’m definitely in support of A, regardless. I only know complex words from having seen them used correctly in the wild; how could anyone be expected to learn them otherwise?
The ability to find an approximate definition of a new word using context - and slowly whittle it down to the actual definition over subsequent encounters - is invaluable for gaining better language comprehension.
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
C: I once wrote a high school physics lab report in poetic meter, with rhymes and all.
I failed, but that’s what community college was for. No regrets!
I prefer it to be as precise as possible. Any words I don’t know, I will look up.
Long is fine, as long as it’s broken into paragraphs. I’m not gonna parse a wall of text.
