100% agreed. And you’re definitely not alone. Someone once told me, when they asked me to describe the company I worked for, that “Your 5 minute pitch is much better than your 30 second pitch.” The reasons are similar. And when I do try to condense and refine my language, I tend to run into the problem that most readers/listeners almost completely ignore qualifiers and caveats, however explicitly stated. I like to say that most of the meaning of a sentence is buried in the small words that are easy to ignore. It’s very hard to express a web or network of meanings. That’s also why people talk about “unpacking” and “close reading.”
From CS Lewis, in the Space Trilogy:
“Of course I realise it’s all rather too vague for you to put into words,” when he took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, “On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.”
Godric Gryffindor’s autobiography had been a lot more compressed than the books Hermione was used to reading, he used one sentence to say things that should’ve taken thirty inches just by themselves, and then there was another sentence after that...
Many ideas are hard to fully express in words. Maybe no idea can be precisely and accurately captured. Something is always left out when we use our words.
What I think makes some people faster (and arguably better) writers is that they natively think in terms of communication with others, whereas I natively think in terms of world modeling, and then try to come up with words that explain the word model. They don’t have to go through a complex thought process to figure out how to transmit their world model to others, because they just say thing that convey the messages that exist in their head, and those messages are generated based on their model of the world.
100% agreed. And you’re definitely not alone. Someone once told me, when they asked me to describe the company I worked for, that “Your 5 minute pitch is much better than your 30 second pitch.” The reasons are similar. And when I do try to condense and refine my language, I tend to run into the problem that most readers/listeners almost completely ignore qualifiers and caveats, however explicitly stated. I like to say that most of the meaning of a sentence is buried in the small words that are easy to ignore. It’s very hard to express a web or network of meanings. That’s also why people talk about “unpacking” and “close reading.”
From CS Lewis, in the Space Trilogy:
And of course, from HPMOR ch 70:
Many ideas are hard to fully express in words. Maybe no idea can be precisely and accurately captured. Something is always left out when we use our words.
What I think makes some people faster (and arguably better) writers is that they natively think in terms of communication with others, whereas I natively think in terms of world modeling, and then try to come up with words that explain the word model. They don’t have to go through a complex thought process to figure out how to transmit their world model to others, because they just say thing that convey the messages that exist in their head, and those messages are generated based on their model of the world.