Emotional rescue.

Emotional rescue.

I try to explain myself to others through words. Often I feel like I do a better job of it through writing than I do speaking, because with writing I can craft those words to carry as much weight as needed and to be as specific as I want them to be. In the real world -- advertising and marketing, and music and pop cultural pieces, and that sort of thing -- I am really good at this. In the emotional world, when I'm directly conversing with a single person, I'm less than successful, but I think I've figured out why.

When you're writing about an emotional subject your reader isn't going to notice your nuanced choice of vocabulary, they're just going to react to the portions that directly effect them and skim over everything else. They're usually looking for a direct answer to a particular question, and the surrounding verbiage is just so much detritus they have to sort through to find their goal.

So what's the solution? Maybe when writing to someone about an emotionally difficult subject I should stop worrying about trying to make my point as clear as possible, or to explain my motivations, and simply give the reader the answer they're looking for and leave it at that.

Of course all the above is untrue in the world of actual spoken conversation, since in emotional situations that's perfectly suited to messily veer from one point to another in its search for answers.