QUOTE(Somey @ Fri 16th January 2009, 6:43pm)
The impulse towards verbosity is often closely related to the impulse towards perfectionism - a depressive characteristic. You want to ensure that there are no "holes" in your argument, so you try to cover all the bases, which takes a lot of verbiage. In many cases, it's initially borne out of the fear of failure, harsh criticism, and exposure (usually of self-perceived, but not admitted, lack of competence or expertise).
And if being verbose (particularly in writing) helps to reduce the amount of negative attention you get, simply because people tend to give up in frustration over the amount of time it takes to read your stuff, then it becomes a self-reinforcing habit.
Unfortunately, some academic disciplines reward written verbosity to such an extent that some people become habitualized to it without having such psychological inclinations at all, which makes it difficult to generalize.
I'm often guilty of it myself, of course, as this post probably demonstrates. (IMG:
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FWIW, in FT2's brief sojourn here, he PM'd me to explain that every post he made took him a long time to craft - perhaps an hour. He was obsessive about being misunderstood or misrepresented - yet the result was that he was often incomprehensible or ambiguous - the very result he was seeking to avoid.
I'd always assumed that he was very into his NLP stuff, and deluded himself that he had exceptional mental powers - therefore any failure to communicate was other people's problem.
So, my theory of mind, if you like, is that analysing FT2's behaviour as a normal, balanced person might lead to some faulty conclusions. If someone has to work that hard to try and put together posts, then perhaps he is not as bright as people might assume, and assumptions about his comprehension of matters might be misled by this.
I am especially concerned that he often makes comments about the amount of time he spends on things - that makes him sound obsessive, but he might just not be very good at stuff. It might also fit with his comments that he has read lots of stuff but didn't realise what the issue was.
My guess is he has a degree on a suspect course from a suspect university like Media Studies at Lincoln University and he thinks it means he is educated.