Rishon Rishon

Detail thinkers, Holistic thinkers - Part 5

Steven Den Beste’s post about my post has turned up a menagerie of self-described holistic thinkers. Of course, I am one too.

However, I am also a stickler for detail when it comes to my utterances and writings. I don’t think that I’d have quite same reaction as Steven to corrections of factual errors in my posts – however peripheral to the point I’m trying to make. Brian Tiemann comes close to describing my reaction. I, however, wouldn’t assume that my reader is specifically trying to help me, as does Brian. Rather, I’d assume that he or she wants to share with me some information that I might want to know – that, in fact, I do want to know. If I were in Steven’s place, I would correct the error immediately, in-line, [perhaps using square brackets] so that no reader would be mislead into thinking an untruth, or worse, into thinking that this particular untruth is untrue in a way that impacts my thinking as a whole.

I have long felt that email, and now to an even greater degree blogs, are an answer to a problem that I’ve long had – the problem, I think, that really bothers Steven – of trying to make a point in a discussion only to have my interlocutor latch on to a peripheral point and try to make a point of his own. I have nothing against another person doing this, except that it invariably prevents me from making my own point. Using email, and now blogs, we can do both at once.

However, there is another potential problem when this happens – that my interlocutor is uninterested in taking the time to understand my point, in other words that I’ve failed to communicate. And communication is one of man’s primal desires.

As Steven says:

I won't reach every reader no matter how hard I try. I don't even expect to reach the majority. But if nearly all the mail I get about a specific post is pedantic, then it suggests that I didn't reach hardly anyone. If that goes on and on, post after post, it makes me feel as if I'm not succeeding overall in what I'm trying to do when I write for this site.

That's what gets me down. Perhaps it meant that the forests I've been describing weren't really very important, or weren't there are all. Perhaps I failed to write well enough about them to make them real for my readers, and all they could see was trees. If nearly all the comments I receive about some article are nitpicks, it means that article failed. If that goes on day after day, post after post, then I'm failing as a writer.

In a nutshell, I think, Steven is describing his distress over the possibility that he is failing to communicate.

Steven: you are not failing. Don’t forget the silent majority of your devoted fans.

Posted by David Boxenhorn at May 7, 2004 11:59 AM