Quote:
Originally Posted by willie24
a very small % of my posts are in SE. not sure what your point is, though.
I thought so.
Quote:
when people are communicating through conversation, 5 sentences at a time, back and forth > 5 pages at a time.
Few in the real world think 5 sentences back and forth is an ideal way to utilize a written communication medium to explain difficult concepts. I don't write that much more than in a conversation block than you do, except when I'm going out of my way to explain things in detail to accomodate some of you. In this thread, for instance, what appears to be verbosity is simply my truncation of multiple posts into one. For instance, note how easily this post could've been two posts.
Quote:
people who write 5 pages at once tend to be lecturing more than conversing - that is, they think they have something that others should learn.
Funny, you asked me to explain something last time you accused me of this. Should I have given one tenth of the explanation, see if you get it and move to the next tenth? And have a long back and forth? I unintentionally did that in one thread in Economics and everyone who jumped into the thread late was confused, because they don't know which posts they needed to read. Unless you're keeping up with the thread in real time, having what is effectively a single explanation span multiple posts is even more confusing.
Quote:
but the problem is that, whether they do or not, others don't know they do. i just have no reason to believe reading a 5 page post from a semi-random on the internet is worth the effort.
Nothing compels you to read anything. On the contrary, I don't desire more readership than I have now. Maybe you want to be read, but don't project your desire on others. Do you write the author of every book that you didn't read to inform her why? And lecture on what she should do so that you would read it?
Quote:
i think you are mistaken on this one. i can almost guarantee you that others will understand more of what you say once you get good at condensing it.
See bolded above. The opposite is true - if I were to insert more analogies, more examples, story arcs, emotional anchors, etc, each point I make would be much more understandable. But as I said before, even I'm not quite that unwise to allocate my time in that manner. People would understand more of what I say, if I made fewer, less complex points, but that would defeat my main motive here - communicating to myself in a structured manner things that I don't completely understand on an instinctive level.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dudd
Phone Booth, you are writing on an internet message board, not a Phd dissertation. If you can't get your point across in one, maybe two paragraphs, you're just rambling.
All your posts here combined fit in one or two paragraphs? And a typical PhD dissertation - I understand how badly written that is, btw - is far more concise than a typical 2p2 post or any conversation of the sort willie25 was talking about. Raw length is a bad measure of brevity and don't mistake your short attention span for etiquette on appropriate length on an internet message board. It's incredibly easy to ignore or skip posts that are too long to read. I don't post here to exchange clever one-liners with you guys.