From, “On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads”
Using this “careful” language just softens your ideas to the point of being inarguable. If you start a sentence with “I feel…” then no one can dispute anything that follows, since it’s just your feeling. This is boring to read.
There is nothing inherently wrong with hedging language or prevaricating when your epistemic certainty is vague. This does not reflect a lack of confidence, but rather acknowledges the writer’s inability to draw a definitive conclusion given the limitations of the available evidence.
In my article in which I posit a link between IQ and obesity, I use defensive language because there is literally not enough information to draw upon on to say with a high degree of certainty that such a link exists, so it’s just a hunch, and my choice of language reflects this. Conversely, for my article about metabolism, I say without equivocation or hesitation that “slow metabolisms must exist,” as this is borne out by many studies and lots of anecdotal evidence. So it’s reasonable to assume it’s true and real.
The overuse of what the author calls “careful language,” echoes my thoughts on the enduring popularity of ‘academic-style writing,’ which persists even though people also complain about it at the same time. Defensive writing thrives because we live in an era where everyone’s a critic.
For this reason it’s not uncommon to see a long Substack blog post in which there is effectively a second essay in the footnotes addressing or anticipating the inevitable reader objections in the comments. So you have to not only write the main post, but a second post. Disabling comments or deleting nitpicking comments invites criticism of censorship or being closed-minded to critcism, so it’s an unwinnable situation.
Readers, even paying subscribers, are unfortunately part of the problem. In the comments of Substack posts and on Twitter this is apparent, where nitpicks and objections are algorithmically-promoted in terms of up-votes, ‘likes’ and other visible signifiers of popularity and peer approval. If these nitpickers were seen as pedantic and annoying the problem would go away, but they are showered with approval by the audience of other readers, so it persists.
This relates also to my post “The Interlocutor’s Advantage”, in which I argue that sharply-worded objections are seen as more credible to audiences than the original post that the objection is replying to, or even if the objection doesn’t even contain useful information, is rude, or wrong. Reddit-style threaded communities make objections visible and direct underneath the ‘parent’ comment, compared to multi-page Vbulletin-style forum threads where replies are pushed off to distant pages.