Monday 1 December 2008

Communicating to be understood

"Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on... Writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simple-minded by those with a tenacious belief that impassible prose is a hallmark of intelligence."

(Source: Alain de Botton, found in 'Authoring a PhD' by Patrick Dunleavy)

It always cracks me up when people attend a lecture by a big Shaykh/Professor/ etc and they come out of it saying, "Man, that was a good lecture". And then when you ask them, "What was it about?" They respond, "Don't know. But it sounded deep."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I only had useless crap to say, I wouldn't bother saying it at all - never mind trying to say it 'publicly' via a blog. Do yourself and everyone else a big favour and delete it - immediately!

Anonymous said...

It is of benefit to me.

Wayfarer said...

LOL @ Anonymous!

Its true, why do we have blogs?

adil said...

Thank you Anonymous. Good point. I will set my Blogs to private (invitees only!) access until I can convince myself otherwise.