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My SEO doesn’t like my language. My comprehensibility score is often low. The problem seems to be that I don’t like short sentences, and tend to use big words.
And that’s a problem – for me. Do I tailor my language to drive up business or do I stay true to myself and be verbose? It’s all very challenging when I consider writing as one the few creative outlets that I have, only to be told that nobody understands me (or at least the SEO says that you wouldn’t understand my overelaborate verbiage that I use to get my point across).
Mind your language, 1978
Of course, there are those who consider it a disability to not be able to make my point clear in as few words as possible – "bottom line it" (sorry Eric!) makes my brain freeze…how do I get my point across when I need to explain the rationale behind my thinking.
So here’s the deal. If you want to read anything I write, bear with me, I’m not showing off, I’m not broken, I’m just putting the words down as they enter my head.
One of the peculiarities of my ADHD is that I have a multitude of competing voices trying to get my attention, and sometimes that means in order to follow a chain of thought it goes via a circuitous route. It also means there are times that I am making sense of an idea as I am talking/thinking and simply subjecting you to the process. And maybe sometimes I’m just not sure you get what I am saying so I need to pack in as much information in as I can to get my point across.
That’s the problem when you’ve spent your life feeling misunderstood or having to rationalize your “differentness”, you land up being a constant rationalizer! And rationalizing needs words, lots of them
Get to the point! That’s the problem, that is my point, in a long and rambling way, and nothing pisses me off more than being told to do just that. I’m never sure if it’s the ODD in me, or simply that in not feeling understood in the first place, but let me get my point across my way otherwise I’m not sure I got it across right in the first place.
My therapist during my dark days of addiction would often smile and let me finish my diatribe of explaining why I was struggling to work around my drinking only to remind me that I was an expert on rationalizing my behaviour. But she also understood the need I had to say what needed to be said without abruptly interrupting and telling me to “Get to the point”. And that’s one of the reasons I’m still alive here today – if she could handle it when I was less than sober, I’d hope you can too that I am very sober.
*ODD – Oppositional Defiant Disorder. ODD is an ongoing pattern of an angry or irritable mood, defiant or argumentative behaviour, particularly toward people in authority. (definition modified from WebMD)
**Surprisingly my SEO Flesch reading ease on this piece is 65% meaning it's "OK" to read. However, they add this: Sentence length: 50% of the sentences contain more than 20 words, which is more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.
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