Asklemmy

43328 readers

1604 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

What reading style do you consider more tedious to read, A) short, concise, and precise, but using non-layperson vocabulary, B) using layperson vocabulary, but it's longer, drawn out, and not precise? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by CraigOhMyEggo@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I don't think poor clarity is tightly coupled to vocabulary. Poor clarity often comes from extra words and poorly organized text.

"John walked to the grocery store"

"The man known in his building, but not throughout the entire city, as John, took it upon himself to walk the winding streets of Brooklyn on foot until he reached a open storefront that sold mostly, but not exclusively, groceries"

The latter is pretty limited in vocabulary but is a mess.

[–] Etterra@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

You're partially right. "John left out the front door, turned right, and walked down 3 blocks to the Whole Foods at the corner of 32nd Street, it's by the McDonalds on your right. If you hit the Shell station you've gone too far. Let me write it down to for you. Do you need a map?"

[–] mocha_lotsofmilk@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Honestly, I don't think the second one is a mess (except punctuation). I think it just conveys - or at least suggests - that something out of the ordinary is happening. It takes mundane things and makes you question them, given the extra attention given to the normal things like a name or place. Sounds like John maybe isn't his real name and maybe he's going to this store for something other than groceries.