Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

And this depends on the audience.

Sometimes the audience can make you bashful.

Here are a handful of answers derived from personal experience of myself and others:

* lack of practice; of reinforcing feedback in the form of pushback when not making sense and approval when making sense; perhaps because etiquette makes us too nice to respond in a tight feedback loop

* or a failure to learn from that feedback when provided, because distracted or not viewing it as important, or something to do with excessive dopamine-stimuli that makes longer-term learning difficult, or by nature.

* or, because communication is not so much about precisely expressing things as it is about saying enough to allow your counterparty to produce a mirror of your own mental model, a poorly calibrated sense of what other people know, due to mostly being around people who think very similarly to them

* an overactive mind that has a lot of different things to say—whatever comes to mind—and no particular training in how to organize all those things

I benefitted immensely from a presentation a coworker once gave on the "consulting pyramid" style of writing. In short, your thinking is constructed of "data > arguments > conclusion", and you actually come by those data and arguments in a somewhat random order; if you present an idea exactly as you came up with it it will be a complete mess. Instead, always lead with the conclusion, then a few top-level arguments; then build on the arguments in more detail; then supply data.

This is amazingly general. In writing you can create your argument exactly like this, with increasing detail / volume at each level. In verbal communication, supply the lower, larger levels only if asked.

It seems that having somebody tell you this stuff one time is enough to shake a person out of the mode of "say whatever they're thinking as soon as they think it."

It also helps to recognize rambling and incoherence as confusion, and take that as a cue to go write the whole thing down and organize it.

In my experience when somebody is pointing out flaws that they see in many, many others then it's often the individual that has the problem. Is that what's going on here? You don't appear to acknowledge it might be you are the issue.

Here are some altruistic reasons these events might occur:

> - don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question

> - don't stay focused to the point of the discussion

I often dive deeper if the question itself raises suspicions that the question asker might not fully understand the topic. For example, if someone asked: "can you unbatch those 1k RPCs?", I might go into more detail than a "yes" or "no". I do it to spare the question asker from making a bad decision, without wanting to embarrassing them by saying that the question is too simplistic, or makes no sense.

> - don't some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

You yourself are missing words in your communication like the word "have" in the quote above. Also, I don't know enough linguistic rules to correct you, but colloquially at least your title is better understood if you write it as "Why do some people not communicate clearly?" So some compassion when others misspeak might be good. Often it's possible to read between the lines.

> - generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

Creativity is often the expansion of a topic, or the merger of multiple topics. Maybe your question sparked their creativity and they're taking the opportunity to show you some of their creative thought process.

managers tend to /want to/ over-simplify things. SWEs have to bear the consequences of every exception to an over-simplified rule, that non-experts did not want to know about. Yeah there's a 1% problem, complex, unrewarding, but we'll spend 90% of the total effort on it because we can't have our system crap out once a month