The profoundly frustrating thing about "stop using big words or complicated phrasing" criticisms is that they're not actually constructive.
It only sounds constructive if you do bad-faith idea-fitting: if you assume that the person is not saying what's in their head in the way that is most natural and clear to them.
Because if you do put yourself into the mental state of saying things as clearly and naturally as you can, it should be obvious that if the feedback isn't specific, you have no way to figure out which of your many words and phrasings didn't click with someone.
To use a recent example: to me it is equally not intuitively obvious that these two things would cause confusion in casual conversation:
escalation in violence isn't moving up discrete levels of maximal potential harm, it's sliding the scale of survival probability in your favor
To me they are only as complex as the underlying ideas force them to be, and no more. At the time of writing the thoughts behind them are equally clear and smooth and those words are the most direct flow of thought to language I have.
If I could intuit what might be difficult about either the language or the thoughts behind it, I would've worked to mitigate it. Clearly I failed, but how?
Like I really appreciate that even thesaurus Anon was giving me feedback, in their own way, but I can't do anything with it by itself. My mind doesn't have big words - it has words I comfortably know and words I don't.
Let's look past the false premise that I ever use a thesaurus to write (well, okay, I did eventually start occasionally using them to look up simpler or more common words that are close enough to words I would automatically use, after being accused of trying to sound smart or wording things in convoluted ways too many times).
"Don't use a thesaurus" is saying that somewhere in the space of all language I have sorta recently used there is too many words that are not smooth enough for others to parse that they stand out. Except to me that (inconceivably large) space is filled with just me comfortably using words that come naturally do me.
And if someone did good-faith idea-fitting on my words and the likely intentions behind them I don't see how they can conclude that it would be obvious to me which of the countless words that flow out of me naturally don't click.
At least when someone tells me a specific thing I said makes no sense to them I can start proactively interviewing people and thinking about how other minds work to figure out why that might be.
But the possibility space of all wordings I could use instead is also infinitely large. So instead of a giant range of spots to check an infinity of alternatives, I narrow down to a focused spot to check an infinity of alternatives.
And that helps (a lower-cardinality infinity is definitely substantially smaller), but if I had any strong evidence for any direction in that space being more likely to be the best possible wording, don't you think I would've taken it or at least explored it?
Of course sometimes I just overlook better wordings that I could think of. Mostly that happens out of habit or lack of time: some turns of phrase become automatic for certain mind flows and doing an "optimization pass" over them could collapse the wording into a simpler wording that still works, but only by taking advantage of that specific context.
If I use a convoluted phrasing it is almost always because it is actually more robust, more enduring. Instead of falling apart when looked at closely or moved, it brings enough cues that a careful and diligent thinker who does good idea-fitting can keep tracing over the details and asking "why this choice?" until eventually they find the right meaning, or get at least close to it.
But that requires readers to do good idea-fitting, and I wouldn't've felt the need to define a distinct term for it emphasizing that it is an active and iterative skill, one which composed well with abstract value words like "good" and "bad", if it was something that most people were already reliably doing well.
There is no conclusion here. No nice summary. I am still working on being more concise. And using smaller words. And simpler phrases. I won't stop anytime soon.
But good ideas rarely fit into either of those, let alone all at once. My language is a result of that, and it is unhelpful to me when people assume any other motive or reason for my wording choices.
