HeroOfHyrule wrote:
Unlike a lot of people I don't assume that others know everything about the topic I'm talking about, so I feel the need to be detailed and give clarifying information when it may be needed.
I think that could be the origin of the whole thing. At school I noticed that after a few years the teachers seemed to be assuming a foreknowledge of some matters that I just didn't have, and therefore I couldn't follow the work any more. Figuring that to be bad practice, when I explained things to people I tried to do it properly, which meant assuming they knew nothing about the subject, and that they couldn't infer anything from context.
But all that happens is that my listeners get frustrated because I'm wasting their time by telling them a lot of things they already know, providing further clarifications when it's already clear to them. Ideally they would interrupt and feed back to me their grasp of what I'd told them, which I guess would convince me I'd made my point and that it was OK to stop. But they very often don't. Maybe it's not considered polite. And if I were to offer just a brief explanation without the extras, I'd expect them not to ask for details when they needed them, and so the explanation would fail.
At school I could in theory have interjected requests to explain the missing information, but I couldn't think fast enough to frame the right questions, and I don't suppose the teachers would have taken kindly to my constantly slowing the production line down by asking about things that everybody else knew.
21 Aug 2021, 10:56 am
