A if I know the vocabulary. B if I don’t.

Its all about the audience.

C: I once wrote a high school physics lab report in poetic meter, with rhymes and all.

I failed, but that’s what community college was for. No regrets!

Long is fine, as long as it’s broken into paragraphs. I’m not gonna parse a wall of text.

A

There is always the Wikipedia style link to the definition whenever such word arrives. This is what browser tabs are for.

There’s a third option and I use it to explain things to stupid, old, and Boomer people. Not that those are mutually exclusive but that’s beside the point.

You have to dumb it down but still be concise. Use the fewest number of words necessary, and explain it in a way that any idiot can understand. For example, when I explain how computers work to my dad and stepmother, I explain it with simple analogies like “The hard drive is where the memory lives, the ram is where the short-term memory lives, the processor is where the thinking happens, and the motherboard is the body that holds it all together.”

When writing manuals, as in for work procedures, You need to also give them step by step specific instructions, with pictures if possible, screenshots will do for software, so they know what to look for. I’ve worked with a lot of tech illiterate people and you really need to make it super simple so that everybody can understand that page 3 explains how to do this thing, and page 5 explains how to do the other thing. No preamble, no flowery language, just simple instructions, including literally which buttons to push in what order to make a thing happen. Also including a this is what you do if something you don’t recognize or understand happens to go backward, and a reminder to ask for help if all else fails or you get confused.

I worked in a warehouse for 10 years and that exact procedure worked great for teaching people are stupid, goofy, proprietary, 30-year-old pre-Windows XP software, along with windows instructions for how to get it working where necessary. You might feel like you’re talking down to people, so if it’s verbal you have to say it in a non-aggressive, non-confrontational, helpful tone of voice, ask them if they understand, etc. If they ask why it seems so simplistic or see that you can skip a certain step because they understand it already, you just tell them that they have to make the manuals understandable by everybody, and that you have to explain it to them this way because you’re made to by management. Always pass the blame uphill.

I once read a 40 page article about laying undersea cables, in Wired, by Neal Stephenson. It was so engaging and I learned a lot. So for me, longer and written for layperson. Absolutely. Also I was quite surprised a magazine would give anyone that much space.

I think that the answer to this depends on the audience and the topic or nature of the discussion.

I prefer precise, technical language if the audience has experience in the topic. You can save a lot of time by not explaining things that the readers should, reasonably know.

I think simpler language is appropriate for a more general audience or higher level discussion.

It can be challenging to find the right balance on a forum, like this, where you don’t necessarily know who the audience is.

I’d rather short, concise, and precise for spoken word and longer and drawn out for written word, if I had to choose.

I would much rather learn a new word than slog through a glib deluge.

I dont have a preference as long as there aren’t excessive acronyms or at least explaining what the acronyms stand for. Im not trying to decode three letter mysteries all throughout a person’s writing.

If you can only express yourself in those 2 extremes you have a bigger problem than lemmy