Asklemmy

43395 readers

1348 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What reading style do you consider more tedious to read, A) short, concise, and precise, but using non-layperson vocabulary, B) using layperson vocabulary, but it's longer, drawn out, and not precise? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

You could have just said, "Why not both?" 😜