It’s mostly an issue of, “how much effort is communication for each party?”
If you are writing an article that will be read by thousands of people, it makes sense to spend several hours to save each of them a couple minutes.
If you are teaching students who are new to the subject, and presumably have difficulty communicating where their confusion is, it makes sense to spend a lot of effort modelling them and their understanding, so your lecture builds intuitively on top of that instead of them having to contort their brains until it clicks.
If you are writing a comment that only a couple other people will ever read, and you don’t expect it to be controversial or difficult to understand, stream-of-thought writing is probably fine.
If you are debating someone on the internet, both of you are acting in good faith, and both of you are about as smart, you should write like the other person will spend the effort to understand, and read like the other person is as smart and acting in good faith as you assume they are. Doing anything different is acting in bad faith. Either you are treating them like they are stupid or they are neglecting to put in the same amount of effort as you. Now I understand there is not the intention of acting in bad faith, and in fact acting like people are lazier or stupider than they actually are may lead to better communication as a general rule of thumb, but anytime you change norms so unintentional bad faith gets rewarded, people start committing a worse sin: they act in bad faith and don’t even know why that was wrong!
It’s mostly an issue of, “how much effort is communication for each party?”
If you are writing an article that will be read by thousands of people, it makes sense to spend several hours to save each of them a couple minutes.
If you are teaching students who are new to the subject, and presumably have difficulty communicating where their confusion is, it makes sense to spend a lot of effort modelling them and their understanding, so your lecture builds intuitively on top of that instead of them having to contort their brains until it clicks.
If you are writing a comment that only a couple other people will ever read, and you don’t expect it to be controversial or difficult to understand, stream-of-thought writing is probably fine.
If you are debating someone on the internet, both of you are acting in good faith, and both of you are about as smart, you should write like the other person will spend the effort to understand, and read like the other person is as smart and acting in good faith as you assume they are. Doing anything different is acting in bad faith. Either you are treating them like they are stupid or they are neglecting to put in the same amount of effort as you. Now I understand there is not the intention of acting in bad faith, and in fact acting like people are lazier or stupider than they actually are may lead to better communication as a general rule of thumb, but anytime you change norms so unintentional bad faith gets rewarded, people start committing a worse sin: they act in bad faith and don’t even know why that was wrong!