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.
I once read a 40 page article about laying undersea cables, in Wired, by Neal Stephenson. It was so engaging and I learned a lot. So for me, longer and written for layperson. Absolutely. Also I was quite surprised a magazine would give anyone that much space.
B, by a country mile; especially if it’s in passive voice. This style of writing is really prevalent in scientific writing; it needn’t be.
Long is fine, as long as it’s broken into paragraphs. I’m not gonna parse a wall of text.
If you can only express yourself in those 2 extremes you have a bigger problem than lemmy
Mix
What if one isn’t possible? Which of the two would you choose?
It sounds like a strange scenario. You can write a lot of text but not make it precise?
I’d say it’s better to have it short and precise. It gives you an opportunity to study the details and learn while the long text sounds like it could be more open to interpretation and confusion
A
Woah, slow down there with all that jargon! Could you put it in layman’s terms for me?
a
Could you dumb it down a shade?
A: finding new words makes me happy.
I prefer it to be as precise as possible. Any words I don’t know, I will look up.
Exactly what I do. Plus I get to learn a new word and feel smarter
And communicate better
I find it more difficult to read text that are short, concise, but using lots of specialized vocabulary. However, a problem about the second choice is making it simple in words, but structured in such a way that ensures both attention and comprehension.
The problem with walls of text, and a problem I also encounter in stuff I write myself, is how there’s just a wall of text. A string of lengthy paragraphs consisting of long sentences that just go on and on without providing the reader a place to pause. That is: a point in which the reader can stop, check for comprehension or just a breather.
Reading such a block of text can be tiring.
I’ve been taught to employ a variety of sentence and paragraph lengths, and try to apply them to my writing. However, this can run the risk of making the result disjointed and rambly. I am guilty of this myself. I realize that this just means I didn’t take the time to collect and organize my thoughts before typing things out. It can be as simple as thinking about what I want to say in the first place, or it can be as involved as thinking about the main point and any supporting points, and how I can lay them out such that they flow neatly in the result.
Longer texts can be improved with just a bit more care in their composition, and without it, walls of text are definitely a chore to read.
EDIT:
I should proofread before hitting
post.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.
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!
Doing things like this makes Neil deGrasse Tyson cry.
There is always the Wikipedia style link to the definition whenever such word arrives. This is what browser tabs are for.
Gimme the jargon
A
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.
This is the way. We can’t appease everyone and that’s okay.
