This is not a post about politics, but rather one about writing.
It is a cold hard truth that it is the writer’s job to make themselves understood, not the reader’s job to puzzle them out. Stoid, if people are consistiently misunderstanding your view point, you need to change your approach. Good writers use radically different writting styles different places and even on different THREADS depending on their percieved audience. They say things, have them misunderstood, restate them from a different angle.
A second truth, this one about debating, is that it only works if you assume that your opponent is an intelligent, rational person with reasons for reacting/responding as they do. If they misunderstand something posted, it is probably due to lack of clarity on the original poster’s part, rather than willful ignorance. It falls on the head of the original poster to go back and rephrase, rework, restate until understanding is achieved. This is where debate happens–if everyone understood everyone else’s argument from the get go we could skip the debate and commence with the name calling.
When restating one’s posistion, it is better to say “I see I have not made myself clear” than to say “I can’t believe you guys can’t understand this.”
Often, the process of reshaping an arguement to make it coherent to other people will lead to the transformation of that arguement. There is nothing wrong with that–intuitions are given reasons and thoughts are made more orderly. Hell, the reason I read and post here is so that I can clarify my own arguements before I take them out into the real world. There is nothing wrong with saying "I am changing gears here. I’ll concede that my arguement Y dosen’t seem to come together the way I would like it to, but the issue I want to concentrate on is X . … " where X is a stronger formatation of Y, where one has fixed all the little logical fallicies and misapprehensions your fellow debators have so kindly pointed out.
In the end, you have to care a little. You have to want your point of view to be understood correctly, and you have to want that badly enough to be willing to spend the time to really think about what the opposistion is saying and to come up with a way to make yourself understood, even if you have to post the same thing, worked over in different ways, a dozen times. You’ll notice I have a rather low post count even though I have read the boards daily for well over a year: I rarely care that much, myself, so I lurk. I find that the best attitude to take while posting is that of a teacher–one is trying to teach people something, and it is a piss poor teacher who says something one way and claims it to be self-evident. A teacher teaches until the job is done.
