But in my writing, I tend to rewrite and re-organize and edit down heavily. I spend a lot of time thinking about the correct order for presenting the material, how best to elucidate interrelationships, how to get the important ideas into the power positions (typically the first or last element of a group). Partly this is just engineering applied to words. Partly it derives from a sense of poetry, where brevity is extremely important.

Even when editing others, I tend to slash a lot. Much of what we say is just filler, with no semantic weight, and can be deleted with a significant gain in clarity, speed, power, and comprehensibility.

So, I think there’s a big difference between being prolix in writing and in speaking. Maybe if I did more public speaking, they would seem closer to me.

A related point (sometimes known as “eloquent idiots”) is about people who are really good at presenting ideas (e.g. Powerpoint wizards) but really bad at actually thinking things through and being correct. I knew a marcom guy once who spent a ton of money advertising our “complimentary” software, meaning we were giving it away free (though we weren’t), when he actually meant “complementary”, meaning it worked well with our hardware. And I’ve seen many managers who are great at yelling at people but seem unable to make even trivial technical decisions. Sometimes I think that superstitions like astrology, and large parts of most religions, fall into this category. But that’s a whole nother discussion.