22 November, 2003

You what?

I was contacted a couple of days ago by someone making an excellent observation about certain lyrics in Tull's 'A Passion Play', a particular welcome contribution to my Annotated Passion Play. Having added J. Eric Smith's key points to the website, I went on to visit his.
The thing that particularly struck me was the snappy prose style of a professional writer, in considerable contrast to the obscuring precision of an ex-academic, which I'd naturally fallen into when updating the APP annotations.

Obscuring precision. That phrase came to me in the shower a few minutes ago. Almost an oxymoron, but itself illustrating my point: that I occasionally (often?) compose a sentence in a way that conveys exactly what I mean, but perhaps only to me - I know exactly which sense of a word I mean, and which secondary meaning can be inferred, but those who mightn't think in the same way (or, back in the context of academia, those unfamiliar with the conventions of a certain specialism) might interpret my words differently, or entirely misunderstand, or simply find my written style impenetrable.