Monday, October 09, 2006

920 Too Many Words

Monday, October 9, 2006

My back was giving me trouble again today, causing some intense stomach cramps, so I didn't do much of anything except read and nap. I've got to stop falling asleep on my stomach at night. If I fall asleep reading in bed, it bends my back the wrong way.

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I read a lot of blogs (I use Bloglines.com, so it's easy), and one thing that impresses me is how some people can say so much in so few words. Paint entire pictures in one sentence.

I can't do that. I'm too wordy. Maybe I should cut, weed, trim, before hitting "post".

That's if I want to write well. I'm not sure that's what I want, though.

I write the way I speak, and yeah, I do tend to be a bit wordy when speaking. I don't talk much, I tend to be too quiet, but when I do talk, well, Daughter often rolls her eyes.

So I thought about that a while. Why so wordy?

Because I don't like to be misunderstood.

I want people to fully understand what I'm saying.

Many times in the past I've gotten into big trouble when someone misquoted me, or attributed untrue motives to me.

When other writers paint pictures in one sentence, I bring my own beliefs and prejudices to the interpretation. The picture is generated by my mind, not really by theirs. It may or may not look anything like what they meant to convey.

Artists don't seem to mind this - that people may bring different understandings.

I guess I'm not an artist. I'd rather be boring and understood than exciting and misunderstood.

So there.

2 comments:

Becs said...

You were a CoBOL programmer, weren't you? No nasty assembler for you, right?

'c' is even worse....

Comment, comment, comment your code!

~~Silk said...

As a matter of fact, no. Cobol is much too divorced from the machine for what we did. Not only did I write in assembler, I debugged from hex dumps. I have even flipped switches on consoles to input binary patches. The only higher level languages I've used were The Company's own internal ones, that allowed us to "get up close and personal" with the hardware. I have no skills in commercially available languages.

(My late husband wrote extremely tight and esoteric programs, and I was constantly on him about commenting.)