Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-98.235.154.24-20130913002452/@comment-11687-20131031123045

ImposterParrotGrass wrote: I get what you're saying, but it's more than the discussion not suiting peoples fancy. it's that the very sophisticated nature is hard to understand, and can feel annoying to some people, and I suspect, will to more people over time. Your sophisticated tone is hard to understand for a lot of us, I myself often need to reread what you say a few times to get it, and if you and those who use similar tone continue to post your complex walls of text, those here for other reasons (like the scene above) may be intimidated, and turned off from it. In this scenario, people are not being turned off by the topic, but the manner of it's discussion.

So I understand your position, but I ask that you try and be a little more straightforward and simple. This isn't necessarily about walls of text, but the way you compose it.

I do understand your concern, and I'm not unsympathetic to the point you're raising. However, even leaving aside the relative nature of what's considered "sophisticated" - and the overall lack of representation regarding how many people here find the tenor of the discussion off-putting (so far the number of people expressing such a sentiment seems roughly equal with those who are lauding that same quality) - I personally find this style of writing to abet the point(s) I'm trying to make.

Simply put, without any of the subtler forms of communication that go alongside face-to-face speech (e.g. facial expression, tone of voice, body language, etc.), writing is a fairly limited medium for communication. Ergo, I find that accuracy is at a premium when trying to communicate a point that I'm making on a messageboard. As I don't want to rely on people trying to intuit (or otherwise interpret) my meaning, I try to make what I'm saying as clear as possible. Paradoxically, that tends to call for lengthy and highly-precise writing, so as to better eliminate any many ambiguities as possible.

That said, breaking things into paragraphs - with the blank line separating them - is a virtue, as that does break the text into manageable chunks (and reduce the "wall of text" that you mentioned). I had thought that my current use of that was sufficient, but it may be worth revisiting.