In other words, you prefer brevity to clarity and being understood? Something’s a little skewed here.
It sounds like you and TheOtherDave have both identified the problem. Assuming you know what the problem is, why not fix it?
It may be that you are incorrect about the cause of the problem, but it’s easy enough test your hypothesis. The cost is low and the value of the information gained would be high. Either you’re right and brevity is your problem, in which case you should be more verbose when you wish to be understood. Or you’re wrong and added verbosity would not make people less inclined to “round you off to the nearest cliche”, in which case you could look for other changes to your writing that would help readers understand you better.
Well, I think that “be more verbose” is a little like “sell nonapples”. A brief post can be expanded in many different directions, and it might not be obvious which directions would be helpful and which would be boring.
What does brevity offer you that makes it worthwhile, even when it impedes communication?
Predicting how communication will fail is generally Really Hard, but it’s a good opportunity to refine your models of specific people and groups of people.
improving signal to noise, holding the signal constant, is brevity
when brevity impedes communication, but only with a subset of people, then the reduced signal is because they’re not good at understanding brief things, so it is worth not being brief with them, but it’s not fun
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I understand this to mean that the only value you see to non-brevity is its higher success at manipulation.
Is that in fact what you meant?
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In other words, you prefer brevity to clarity and being understood? Something’s a little skewed here.
It sounds like you and TheOtherDave have both identified the problem. Assuming you know what the problem is, why not fix it?
It may be that you are incorrect about the cause of the problem, but it’s easy enough test your hypothesis. The cost is low and the value of the information gained would be high. Either you’re right and brevity is your problem, in which case you should be more verbose when you wish to be understood. Or you’re wrong and added verbosity would not make people less inclined to “round you off to the nearest cliche”, in which case you could look for other changes to your writing that would help readers understand you better.
Well, I think that “be more verbose” is a little like “sell nonapples”. A brief post can be expanded in many different directions, and it might not be obvious which directions would be helpful and which would be boring.
What does brevity offer you that makes it worthwhile, even when it impedes communication?
Predicting how communication will fail is generally Really Hard, but it’s a good opportunity to refine your models of specific people and groups of people.
improving signal to noise, holding the signal constant, is brevity
when brevity impedes communication, but only with a subset of people, then the reduced signal is because they’re not good at understanding brief things, so it is worth not being brief with them, but it’s not fun