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Comment by alexknowshtml | Hacker News Reader

Are you writing for you, or for your reader? Which do you think matters more?

Also, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

Not writing; speaking. Now it's not as if I deliberately employ sesquipedalian graphology for the express purpose of obfuscation. But I've spent a lifetime developing a rich, meaty vocabulary, and I'll be damned if I'm going to talk like a public high school sophomore with a sub-20 ACT score.

Just sayin'.

You may have built up a huge arsenal of words, but it is still important to choose the ones that best get your point across to your intended audience, whether simple or complex. The real challenge is being understood, not using awesome words, and there are plenty of circumstances where the simple words will not be sufficient for what you are trying to do.

One of the neat things about storytelling, in the verbal sense, is that, when done well, it's not just repetition of words. There are inflections, emphasis, physical gesture, posture, facial expressions, and a plethora of other nonverbal factors that go into communicating one's message. I can use words like "lugubrious" or "palliative," and by expression and action, communicate their meanings to my listeners nonverbally.

I don't think using a rich vocabulary is in diametric opposition to being understood. I think you can achieve both ends simultaneously.

I am (or at least was) an experienced assembly programmer. I'm familiar with numerous obscure x86 opcodes that take dozens of machine cycles to execute.

This knowledge comes in handy when reading other peoples' code, but I don't use those instructions myself. Why? Because I know how to achieve the same effect through carefully-scheduled combinations of smaller, faster opcodes.

Exactly the same principle applies in English composition. Use an awkward or unusual word, or a flowery modifier? That's an L1 cache miss. It'll cost a few cycles of wasted execution time, if viewed in terms of the reader's attention span. How about a word that sends the reader to the dictionary? That's an L2 miss. Those can waste thousands of cycles.

You can tolerate a few L1 misses here and there, but those L2 misses that have to be fetched from DRAM will make your "code" run like shit.

One of my team members actually ran out on her lunch break to buy a dictionary. She told me this a month or two after the fact. She needed to look up something I'd written in an e-mail. I apologized for causing her to go to the extra effort--and expense--but she wouldn't accept it. She enjoyed the verbal challenge and the sense that came with it of becoming a more literate person.

Good communication is not always about passing the message in the optimal way.

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