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Old October 21st, 2014 #2
Sean Gruber
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Join Date: Mar 2007
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Obscure or just plain bad writing appears to be characteristic of many (not all) people in technical fields, as counterintuitive as that may seem. For example, try reading the Final Cut Pro 7 manual. This doorstop is about 1,000 pages long, and it almost never tells you how to do a task in FC7. Instead, it is hundreds of pages of sales talk randomly interlarded with specs of limited value to most users. "You can [do x procedure]. And you also can [do x procedure] in a variety of different ways to suit your preferences" -- such is the formulaic phraseology throughout. The writers don't understand that the customer has already bought. He now needs, not fluffing, but step-by-steps. For that, he must bin the manual and go to Apple message boards (or elsewhere) where Earthlings provide the how.

The problem appears to be a type of context-deafness, a deficit in grasping the reader's context of knowledge. Basically, it's a non-venal (and indefeasible) lack of empathy, so it feels related to high-functioning autism (formerly known as Asperger's Syndrome).

I, too, tried to figure out Gamergate but didn't get as far as Sam did. I ended up relying on varg's summary. There's also an element of deliberate ambiguity in the topic, since it has "red box" (politically incorrect) aspects. It may be that not every writer on this topic wants to be perfectly clear.

Another thing involved here is the tendency -- prevalent among "The Big Bang Theory" (a sitcom) character types -- of hoarding info for status. They're "cool" insofar as they're in the know about some pseudo-complexity, and won't make grasping it easy for others. Call this tendency "Beta aggression." When called on it, this type always protests that his listener is too thick-headed to understand the topic. "The topic can't be made simpler than it is," he huffs. With most topics, his statement has merit maybe only 1% of the time. Award-winning cinematographer Greg Toland taught everything there was to know about cinematography to neophyte film director Orson Welles in a weekend. Buckminster Fuller is said to have once used fewer than 300 words to summarize the Theory of Relativity for an audience of common people, with perfect technical accuracy. Surely some skank's making accusations of "sexism" because nobody liked her cruddy game design can be explained in a limited number of plain words. (Though not, admittedly, by anyone worried about a possibility of being sued, which may be an obfuscating factor in itself.) Varg's summary, for one, was as plain as day.

Good writing requires -- in addition to mere technique -- clear understanding, an unclouded motivation to make things plain to the reader, and, above all, empathy, a knowledge of and concern for where the reader is coming from. I hate to say it, but empathy does not appear to be the strongest suit of a fair number of technical folks ("geeks" in common parlance). They need a ghost writer or Cyrano to unpack their hearts and minds to a grateful world.
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