Verbose
Sometimes I get too wordy for my own good. I'm starting to think I need to make enough money to have someone with me at all times to serve as editor. When I need to have a conversation with someone, my editor would take whatever I say to him/her and parse it down to the main point before relaying it to whoever I'm talking to. Or if I'm writing/typing something, I'd hand over the first draft to the editor, and they would fix it so as to save me embarrassment, and to save whoever will be reading it time.
The trouble with this idea is that:
- I'd have to pay someone to hang around all the time for this.
- I'd have someone hanging around me all the time.
- Conversation/communication would be significantly slowed down for me.
I always get reminded how much my communication limitations get in the way whenever I'm trying to have an important conversation with someone. By email, I do get the choice to take my time to compose my reply, but sometimes I end up taking significant amounts of time to compose my reply, then I have to run spell check, and scan over the whole mess again for readability and grammar. My spelling can get atrocious, but I can see my improvement over the years. What's bad is that I still call my spelling atrocious, but I've noticed that the spell check hasn't been finding much beyond my unconventional swear words lately. There are still a few words that trip me up that I haven't found a common enough synonym that I'd feel comfortable using it in day to day conversation. I try to avoid the convoluted and "fancy" vocabulary, because often times you just confuse people.
I think that most of the reason I have such trouble keeping things short is because it is very easy to get me going on a tangent. See the above paragraph and the spelling thing as an example. Granted in my LJ it isn't so important to keep things short and to the point, but I have a hard time turning this habit off when I'm communicating elsewhere too. It really gets in the way on IM when I'm using my phone to IM, as typing a long convoluted message via a cell phone number pad does take a little bit, and I very much loathe the game of cutting words down to a letter, or other such short cuts. Meh.