I originally wrote this as a reply to a native German reader, who commented on one of my posts, but after reading back over it, I thought it would make a good blog post.

(this picture of a purple NPC – Non Playable Character – is just here to illustrate the point that even the most mundane concepts can by spiced up a bit)

https://blurt.intinte.org/blurt/@frot/rku909

PART ONE

We are attempting to communicate using different languages. Not German/English but concise points vs. unbroken collections of long sentences.

If I look at a post in say Russian or Korean where they use totally different characters, it is all utterly meaningless to me.

Looking at a post written in German I understand some words and the structure of the language makes more sense, so although I don’t really understand it, if I concentrate I can at least grasp what the overall topic is.

Part of what makes German so hard to understand is the tendency to join up short words into longer words. eg Backpfeifengesicht – a face in need of a fist.

Maybe in the German psyche this all makes sense, but to an English speaker, compound words are just an incomprehensible mess. We need to break the concept down into it’s components, the shorter the better. Combining the English words into afaceinneedofafist would also no longer be longer meaningful.

https://reference.yourdictionary.com/other-languages/20-long-german-words-with-unique-meanings.html

I understand words much better if they are written in short concise sentences, one idea at a time. A huge pile of words all in one paragraph requires a lot of concentration, almost like looking at German.

The spaces between each idea are important – I’m placing plenty of them here in this post to illustrate that.

So that is my blogging first ideal – short sentences each containing one key idea.

PART TWO

My next ideal (and I’m probably more into this than most people) is to use images to both separate and illustrate each concept.

They switch the reader from left to right hemispheres of the brain and create a complete communication. Just words, as you tend to use, or just pictures, as I would revert to if I was being lazy, are incomplete communications.

Put together, carefully chosen words, along with well placed images create communication many times more powerful than either component by itself.

The slow moving and badly structured videos that have become endemic in modern culture are a step to far worse communication. But that is another area so I’ll leave that for another day.

If I edit this reply bit and add more pictures it would move from being a reply to a post. The concepts are all laid out now.

Looking back over this, I will make it a post because I think it helps explain a fundamental aspect of blogging and communication in general that many people don’t seem to understand.