Write to be Understood
I just finished reading Buckminster Fuller’s “Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth”, and while the message of the book is a noble one — at times it’s framed in such verbose language that it’s nearly impossible to make out what Fuller is trying to say. In the chapter titled General Systems Theory, one sentence in particular stood out to me as comically impenetrable:
The system divides universe not only into macrocosm and microcosm but also coincidentally into typical conceptual and nonconceptual aspects of universe-that is, an overlappingly-associable consideration, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, all the nonassociable, nonoverlappingly-considerable, nonsimultaneously-transforming events of nonsynchronizable disparate wave frequency rate ranges.
If you’re trying to communicate anything, it doesn’t matter how insightful or visionary your thoughts are if they are incomprehensible to others. Your first focus should be on making your ideas understandable. If they’re truly any good, it won’t matter that you aren’t dressing them up in fancy language. When your ideas are plainly expressed they’re easier for both you and your audience to reason about, without the mental overhead of trying to parse what‘s being said in the first place.
