ajqtrz
Chef - loquacious Old Dog
Are you successful though? Do you find that your posts are persuading people specifically because they are so verbose? If not, and I don't see much evidence they are, perhaps a compromise like trimming it just a bit may help you.
Honestly, I've taken to the habit of skipping your posts and just reading @Ashrem's multi-quote point-by-point rebuttals since his 5-12 word snippets of your paragraphs are summing up your points well enough imo.
As for "success" I think I'm probably about as successful as one can be. I'm quite convinced the level of success for the grenade theory of persuasion is close to 0. I have yet to hear of anyone changing their mind on anything because of a clever come-back. It would be sad if that were all it was to take.
I view persuasion as a campaign, not a battle. Battles are short and sometimes decisive, but they seldom, by themselves, win a war.
AND, while I'm at it, I also view discussions as methods of exploration. Thus, I'm often not out to win, but to put the best face on a particular view and see who can rip the mask off. Sometimes I get more persuaded of my view, sometimes not, but it certainly does stimulate conversation...if people don't want to have a lazy conversation of course.
It's difficult to take seriously a critique of my posts from a reader who has "taken to the habit of skipping" them. But what I try to do is to get past the statement/rebuttal/restatement with explanation/rebuttal of restatement with explanation and further explanation cycle. It too gets tedious.
And as for his accuracy, you can't know that unless you have read my posts, now can you?
I disagree. There may be ways to shorten it without the loss of information. Suppose I wished to make points A, B, and C. If I could break B down into B1 and B2 and find D to express A and B1 and E to express B2 and C then D and E is shorter than A, B, and C without either of them being redundant. Mathematics has many instances where the necessary information can be made more succinct.
As the head an IT company for nearly 30 years I've written a bunch of manuals and texts. And you are right about technical writing. Because the subject is usually science and mathematical based it is more concrete. Therefore, there are fewer opinions of what 2+2 might equal. Take, for instance, the "right way" to link and embed a table from Excel to PowerPoint. I can tell you that and do it in about 1 paragraph. But how does one define the "right way" to persuade a person?
I am employed as a technical writer. My task is often to convey a great deal of information as concisely as possible. I can assure you that the normal response of well-educated and intelligent, but busy, people is to respond exactly as Soggy suggests.
The first rule of writing is to know your audience. The problem isn't (usually) that people can't understand what you write. It's that you've chosen the wrong form of communication for your audience and your medium. When your words, style, length, etc. don't match your audience's needs, they won't read it. And as has already been said, surely that detracts from the points you want to make?
See the note on technical writing above. But if people are playing this game are they really that busy?
Of all that has been said, you hit the probably cause of the "problem," if it is one. Aristotle said that rhetoric is the about finding the available means of persuasion. He suggested that there are several possible lines of argument in any question but that one needed to focus on the audience and moving that audience to where one wants the to go -- implying that the means of persuading one audience versus another might be different. And in that we come to an agreement. The audience here is used to short, pithy, hard hitting, memes and mantras and to a quick "debate fix." A "hit hard and move on" type of style. That's what they are used to because that is the current rhetorical style of the West. It hasn't always been that way, but it is now. I could go on to discuss the history of rhetoric in the West and how we got to our current state, but I won't lest Soggy really go ballistic...LOL. The results of that change in rhetoric is the production of camps where everybody sits behind a berg of self-defense rallying everybody on their side to lob meme and mantra bombs at the other side as if a grenade would persuade anybody. It's not about persuasion in today's climate, it's about winning a battle and rallying your side with the pithiness of your remarks. In the end it's a dismal failure and sad, too.
Perhaps all my verbiage is nothing more than an unintentional challenge to the current style of rhetoric with it's divisiveness and anger. Maybe it's just I'm engaged in the work of civil discussion rather than getting my side to win or lose. And maybe I'm just a writer in search of an audience. And I suspect, there are more here willing to do the hard work of reading more than mantra's than you might think.
AJ