I'm pretty sure I don't function in written language like most people do. I had trouble learning to read. Fourth grade basically and with the discovery of Tarzan books, something, for the first time in my life, I wanted to read. I struggle tremendously with spelling and have, as far as I can tell, no visual memory for words. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to spell doppelganger this morning and don't know now if a u belongs in there somewhere. I used to have a paper I tried to write as a child about Madam Curie that was covered with tears of pain and frustration and loathing at the overwhelming challenge and difficulty I had in trying to get it right. No edit function for a pen...
When it came time to write English papers on philosophical subjects in High School the challenge became acute. I thought I had something to say, the material profoundly interested me, but I couldn't make the words say what I meant. I used to write 50 pages of scratch out to get an 8 page paper and I couldn't type for spit either (no computer) so all those mistakes had to be fixed too. It was a nightmare. Only the burning desire to express myself, the feeling of a conscious being, a seer, trapped inside a crippled monkey kept me going.
I used to puzzle over why what I wrote didn't say what I mean. I'd write it again. Nope, no good either. I'd write it again and I kept asking myself, what do I mean, how can I communicate this idea properly. Part of the problem for me, of course, and if you don't mind me saying so, was that some of the things I wanted to say were rather complicated and subtle, or so I sometimes was told since if I might get an F on grammar and composition, I'd get an A on content. I was plowing new ground, going beyond what I was reading, deepening and expanding on what great thinkers were telling me, finding what was and was not true in what they said. Naturally, that's my opinion. Part of the problem was there was no shorthand for what I was thinking. I hadn't worked out a paradigm, a mnemonic or rote contrivance of speech to which I could reference, no 'ground of being' or fancy metaphysical terms to encapsulate and distill things down to.
So I wrote and wrote and kept asking why things didn't say what I wanted to say. In part I didn't know what I wanted to say myself. Thinking, intellectual inquiry, putting into words how one feels, is a process, in some respects I think, of crystallizing out of the unconscious feelings we feel but cannot put to words because we don't experience them linguistically. Thinking, writing, is the act of crystallizing into words that which we feel but can't claim as our own till we do put them to words. It is a process by which we come to understand ourselves by understanding what we feel.
This self-reflective awareness, this art of expressing what we feel is, in part I think, a process of feeling and being or becoming. We have to become what we feel by crystallizing it out into words. But we are never the words. Being itself lies elsewhere. Anyway, part of writing, I think, and part of what makes for so much of the poor quality of what you have raised here as an issue, LordSegan, is that people have nothing to say, and they have nothing to say because they are afraid to feel. They cannot contact that part of themselves that has something worth expressing and that's, as you doubtless know I've said a million times, because we hate ourselves. We cannot allow contact with our feelings because of what is hidden there.
What helped me to improve my ability to say what I want to say was to say it. I'd write a sentence and it was garbage. I'd ask what did I really mean. I'd say that. Nope garbage again. Come on idiot, what are you trying to say. "Well it's this but I don't know how to write it down. I found I could say it, but I couldn't write it. So I stopped writing, stopped thinking how to make a great sentence, use this or that word, structure it to look impressive, a million other considerations than what I wanted to say, this fear that fear, and just said it like I say it. I stopped writing and started talking, talking like I think. I have no real idea what I'm going to say now. how the sentence will look, where it will end, or even where it is going. All that happens as a stream of consciousness. I jump on and wham, off we go, and where it stops nobody knows, though I'm certain, if you've gotten this far, you'd like it to.
This brings me to one final point. Here I am talking about how to express yourself, how to be clear and how to have something to say and I doubt if there's anybody on ATOT and now the political forum who gets told more frequently than me that he's incomprehensible. Hehe! I've learned that being too clear about some things can get you in trouble, that it's better to say things with just that amount of obscurity as to repel the superficial and leave the more serious and penetrative with something to chew on.