The problem with laconic writing.

There’s one thing everyone who knows me tends to notice. I’m a hard person to upset. Not that I don’t feel anger or anxiety, the same people know I do and how much I do. But at the end of the day, while almost always anxious and antsy about something, rarely do I go over the edge and snap.

Today was one of these rare days where I lost my shit.

I’ll not relive the argument, but I suppose the cause of it is something worth looking into. I’ll also not bring the subject of the argument itself for discussion here. Some of you may be able to figure it out, but if you do, don’t bring it up either. It’s of no consequence and won’t add anything to the meaning of this place.

The underlying cause, however, is the misuse of laconic writing. And that’s something I believe I should address, regardless of the argument itself, it’s something worth writing about. Extensively.

Let’s begin from the base: Laconic, adjective, means using very few words.

That definition, by itself, already conveys all of the problems associated with it. Paradoxical? Self-fulfilling cycle? You won’t be able to know without context. Said context is not given, however. That’s the entirety of the problem. But saying that, as it is, also gives no insight into the outcomes and implications of what I call a problem. Again, cutting out words that result in loss of meaning.

Perhaps it’s my own brain, but I personally associate the word Laconic with “Lack of”. It sounds like Lack to me. Call it bias if you must, but I do have a serious distaste for Laconic approaches.

When you cut out words and contextual elements, you create a dry, simple, easily digestible pack of content. It’s approachable, easy to use. Attractive to our ever busy day to day lives, after all, why read through a six hundred page tome when you can flick through a single page and learn “just as much” out of it?

Simple, you’ll learn just as little from it as you would from the full tome if that’s how highly you regard the contents of it.

Without insight into the implications and relations, you can’t form mental connections. And surprisingly, knowledge is made of said connections. I refer again to the concept of a Mind Map, I’ll write on that next, I promise. But assume for now that in order to learn, you are required to associate ideas with other ideas. With scarce amounts of words, you have very few points to create links with.

Now, why is this all a bad thing? Isn’t a laconic definition a good way to recall knowledge? Why, yes to the second question. But do please emphasize the word recall. The issue is that disgusting self-proclaimed teachers leech of that shallow content and use it as abstractions in teaching. They give no depth, context or implications. I doesn’t mean that said speakers don’t know the subject themselves, I can’t look inside their brains to know that, but it creates a lack of direction in how the audience will perceive the content. Think about it now, would you have come to this point of thought had you just stopped reading at the dictionary definition of the word?

My argument was born of one such member of an noncritical audience. Someone who listened to a fifteen minutes presentation and merely assumed the speaker was correct in his definition of a subject. Said member of the audience would rather trust a view without depth from one who was hired to speak than to undergo the critical process of analyzing context and meaning.

I’ll be blunt, said teachers disgust me. And for the audience, it’s sad to observe that they often don’t know better than to trust the one speaking in front of a group without individual judgement. In the end, it was my mistake to enter the conversation when I knew I could well enough end up in a fight. But like I said, I lost my shit. I couldn’t sit idle.

Now, I won’t say laconic writing is bad. But it is so misused that I would say we would be better off without it. Less is more, some might argue. And for fiction, I would agree. Fiction is all about wonder and imagination, the more freedom your reader feels in your work, the deeper he’ll delve and more entangled he’ll be in your creation.

But for nonfiction, for friggin’ education? You don’t want your future engineers assuming that the result of a formula should be around five because it sounds like what usually happens. You don’t want your doctors shoving scalpels in the ballpark area of your liver because the spleen should be close by. Why would you want any one else to behave like that?

Laconic lacks depth. It’s a tool, but if you use a tool for the wrong tasks you can cause unwanted results. Sometimes disastrous ones.

An aside, just because I happen to connect this with another polemic topic. I don’t mind spoilers. Personally, if you tell me the ending of a book or movie, you won’t spoil my enjoyment of it, not even one little bit. This is a matter for a post in itself, however, so I’ll let you wonder about it for a while. On the other hand, you have the tools to try and connect the dots. So, I’ll give you a small riddle of sorts, if anyone is interested, why does my distaste for laconic writing results in my immunity to the negative effects of spoilers?

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