Terseness is a learned skill. Verbosity is too. They're not mutually exclusive, you can apply them where they work. And they're both useful.
(That's exactly 140 characters for you :) )
(That's exactly 140 characters for you :) )
To me, this is exactly the kind of nuance that is lost by training yourself to limit ideas to 140 characters.
And for the record: I don't train myself to limit my thoughts, I train myself to use a form for expressing them appropriate to the medium I'm doing it in. Expressing something shorter and in steps is not inferior to long-winded explanations. If you must blame something for a fine nuance I failed to grasp, blame the fact that English is not my first language. I doubt I would have caught it in Dutch either, but at least that could be a valid reason.
Particularly in technical writing, you've got to get your words nailed down correctly. This is why there are things like the RFC defining what 'shall', 'should', and 'may' mean (intended for other RFCs, but it's also used elsewhere)[1], or the development of Simplified Technical English[2]. The latter was developed in aerospace engineering, where minor misunderstandings can literally cost lives.
Subtle differences between words are important, and they allow us to communicate more complex ideas. Twitter may have it's place, but any conversation involving nuance really isn't suited for it. A high-quality conversation includes caveats and careful framing, which can't really be fit into 140 characters. At least, in my opinion.
[1]https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English
e.g. blunt, rough.
Unfortunately for you, both connotation and denotation were working against you.
— Blaise Pascal (sometimes wrongly attributed to Mark Twain)