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4:48pm December 16, 2011

Wow, I can’t be concise in writing, can I?

allies-person:

Working on response to LA Times, and wrote a 444 word piece.  The Times doesn’t print letters longer than 150 words.  Uh, yeah.

This is why I always turn in papers that are at least 20% longer than they need to be.

Yeah I have a terrible time being concise, as this response will show way too well.  My problem is I usually can’t summarize if my life depends on it. And I can’t see details as unnecessary (quite different from can’t see the big picture – it’s just for me that picture and the details are inseparable).

I had a horrible experience once. More than once but this was the worst because the person had this nasty-ass attitude toward me in particular. She had comprehension issues. I get that. I have far worse comprehension than expression on the best of days and frequently literally cannot read my own writing.  Including because of the length. So I really, really wanted to help her and put huge amounts of effort into it.

I spent hours. And I still couldn’t do it. I’ve been on forums where people will help each other out with things like that. I’d helped others out there when my strengths and their problems came together in the right ways – I can be really good sometimes at “translating” for other people with language issues if it’s words I’ve used before.

 

So I said “I’m trying really, really hard. I can’t do it. Is there anyone around here who might be able and inclined to take a look at this and let me know a good way to summarize this?  Because I just…can’t.”  Something to that effect.

 

Her response?  "This isn’t like your house. You have no servants here. Do it yourself.  You can, you just don’t want to.“

And… okay, that was just twenty kinds of wrong. If this person had ever gotten DD services she’d have known that staff have power over clients. The power dynamic is upside down from the power of lazy rich people over their servants. But the people who like to say I’m a faker, like to call my staff servants because it gives it a very different "flavor” than what it is in reality. (It’s like a glamour spell or something:  It gives a surface appearance at odds with reality. That is one communication skill I lack and hope I never develop.)

Also – who on earth who didn’t have language problems would be willing to write something at a huge length that goes on for pages, but demand someone (servant or otherwise) summarize it for them because it’s so much more effort to write a short response than a long one?  Her weird glamour-thingy she was trying to pass off as reality didn’t even make sense if you looked at it logically.

So… I pushed myself as hard as I possibly could. I really did genuinely want to make my writing accessible to her. I have (gasp) tons of empathy for people with comprehension issues because I have huge ones myself and I know what it’s like. I hate knowing that some people simply can’t read what I write.  But my brain just refuses to work this way.

So by the time I was done. I had written and erased at least fifty times. And I had slammed my fists into my head way more times like that, as hard as I could. And I still had a whopping total of nothing.

 

That was my worst experience with being expected to summarize because the person was so hostile. But it also forced me to learn something about myself.  I realized that for my own safety, if I was having anywhere near this much trouble, I had to regretfully just tell people I can’t do this.  No matter how pissed they get.  I want my writing to be accessible to as many people as possible.  But every time I bang my head that hard there’s a risk of death or other serious complications (I’ve given myself nasty concussions). Plus I often don’t have hours out of my day to lose to accomplishing nothing at all other than self-destructive behavior. I try really hard not to feel guilty over this but it’s hard because I so badly want it to be otherwise.

It’s also hard to get people to understand that long-windedness can be just as much of a language problem as any other. That it’s not necessarily a sign of facility with language, it can be a sign of language difficulties. In my case part of it seems to be my adaptation to severe receptive language issues growing up (as in, mechanisms I used to fake comprehension that are now utterly ingrained into the way my brain handles language), and part of it seems to be difficulty summarizing. There are other parts undoubtedly too, like…

Sometimes I liken myself to an Ent – in Tolkien’s universe they are creatures whose experience of the world is very foreign to language. But the Elves taught them language. For the Ents, every thing humans or elves might say one word for, is an entire story about that one particular thing. They find it incredibly difficult to speak quickly and have a strong cultural distaste for it.

 

That’s very similar to aspects of my actual experience of the world – outside of the language I use about it.  I have no natural tendency to call two things beds (and “the same thing”) just because most people have put them in that category. And also may group things myself by experiential/sensory traits that have absolutely nothing to do with the categories I’ve seen any language group things by. And this foreignness to language itself creates problems when I have to interface with language.  There’s all kinds of problems it can create but one possible problem is definitely wordiness. Like Ents.

And I love that Tolkien wrote their long-windedness as a function of not being suited for language, rather than as being really good with language. The Elves were the best at language and they were much more concise.  While there are aspects of my Ent approach that I enjoy in some contexts, I’m far more likely to see the length of my writing as a major flaw rather than something I’m happy with.  I think what I enjoy is more like the experiences underneath the language problem rather than the way I write itself.

Also I’ve noticed sometimes my writing comes out short. And then I can no more lengthen it than I can summarize my other writing. So part of it is an inability to change how things come out.

And I think my response to you shows this all too clearly. :-/ Good luck paring stuff down. Sometimes I can do that and sometimes I can’t, but… I’ll just say there are reasons that people who know me stay way the fuck out of my way when I’m writing to a deadline, doubly so if it’s one with space constraints.  Hollering and objects flying are unfortunately common, although I usually manage to avoid actually hurting people. But people still don’t tend to want to hang around for some reason. :-P. I hope it’s as bloodless as possible for you.