NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


how when I format my writing to be easy to read, such as making many small, sometimes single sentence paragraphs, it's seen as unprofessional, or at least discrediting.

But I separate them when there's a change in direction, even if it's subtle. Like putting linebreaks inside your functions to separate sections, even if you don't comment it.

Its seen as "being online", which always puzzled me. Its how, as a (mildly? it's hard to tell because of all the subconscious coping skills that tire me) dyslexic person, I don't get lost as much. Helps cluster information in my head, too, i.e. I have better retention of the information just due to formatting.

It strikes me that we have developed norms that push back against clearer communication -- easier to pass on communication -- all in the name of "proper English" (business English) and academic gatekeeping that leaked into other fields.

Academics speak arcane language not because it helps understanding (though some jargon does) but because they all decided it conferred authority, and as a bonus it signaled club membership. But they also liked that it kept it in the hands of "experts", though now that their subjects have access to the language, we find, more and more, they're as far from expert or professional as one can be.

so, idk. consider this the case for posting in all contexts instead of cargo-culting the styles of the field, where possible. if you have to be professional elevate to blogposting. but on some level you gotta elevate the human and communication parts of human communication, and not the preformatted form they expect you to use because they're removing the ambiguity necessary for any interface in the name of protocol that strips anything that might make the recipient feel remorse.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

Mmmm. So lately, we have changed our writing to better relate ideas from one to the other, so as to make longer paragraphs. Messaging apps usually make small amounts of text feel like an entire wall of text because of the aspect ratio, or the way messages are spaced. On top of that we tend to use very big font sizes.

So what feels like a huge amount of text to us, a big animal-girl paragraph, is actually just a sentence or two. I guess it makes us feel silly... But we also think it helps delineate ideas better. Mmm. Maybe we should stick with our original way of writing.

But obvs., practicing longer paragraphs where multiple ideas more strongly flow from one another is also nice.

We do want to say, on defence of academic writing, for all that it's stiff and arbitrary, there's usually a lot of information that is being conveyed, that may have dense connections to other parts of the text. Sometimes, you just have a lot to say, y'know?

The problem with writing in the colloquial, and the reason business English exists, is that of course you find it easier to write in the colloquial…

I think you’ve fallen into a significantly milder form of the same psychological trap that eats those “sovcit” types. You feel frustrated and excluded by the heavy presence of jargon and syntax. It looks arcane. You don’t speak the language, and you don’t much care for it, and it’s very hard to blame a person who hasn’t spent years steeped in that particular terminology.

Fair enough, but nobody’s using academic jargon to feel superior or to project authority, that’s way too much effort. Academia, certainly CS, likes unambiguous language, leaving no room for miscommunication. Just trying to establish the correct use of metric prefixes on powers of 2 was hell, and it’s still causing problems.

You know who does use vocabulary that way? Suits, MBAs and their juniors, with their eternal need to speak in memes. Since when do we all need to be “aligned,” and when will that stop?

I think we all feel, regularly even, like we’re on the outside of something looking in. Never presume the people inside are doing it on purpose. Business English exists across cultures and continents. Have you ever done copyediting for a Brit, or an Aussie, or an Indian? Let alone for someone from a country where English is a totally foreign language. Holy cow. They’re no less literate than an American writer, but they speak a very different colloquial language, and the unedited text might as well be from another planet. In broad strokes, it’s just English, but the littlest of things will seem huge from the other side of the world.

i wrote a long reply but the tldr is it's probably good to assume people are both approaching things with, at least in their eyes, good faith, and that even we academics and recovering academics get to describe our own field as arcane the places where it actually is -- now-phatic phrases that people have been operant conditioned to see as text anchors.

and how that's slowly leaking out of the fields and into correspondence from people subjected to people in the fields, because they pick it up without the implied use.

One reason Twitter as a format (RIP, etc) clicked so well for me is that it encouraged small chunks of thought at a time—I have big and complex ideas but for whatever reason my brain starts tripping over its metaphorical feet when I have to organize them into larger paragraphs.

I wonder if writing longer posts would be easier if I let myself just go bite-size for thoughts (as above) and then edit it up into better flow at the end, if I thought it would really help.

Yeah. My brain is very "everything is connected to everything!!! how can I adequately sequence this!!!" but when it sees bullet points (literal or otherwise) it removes the pressure to add connections between everything and let the surrounding context do the talking.

Mostly I say Twitter because it forced the breaking up of thoughts, though I think you're right that it's ultimately because it turned any given tweet into a bullet point.

other way around, imo. my bullets are contentful because their structure is contextual, tweet-style constraints let that show pretty well as long as i can point out where a depth change happens in a thread. Longer form let's me do that with typography, headings, and basically-protocol level signifiers, without needing to change it that much once I was ok with small paragraphs.

but I suppose most people use bullet points that other way and it's not clear 😅.

and anyway, paragraph length is meaningless when short on a 4k monitor is a third of a screen on a phone :v