Reading streak: 0 days
An article · Message
Why do I over explain instead of just saying the point
Over explaining is not thoroughness. It is what you do when you are not sure the point will survive on its own.
You made the point. You watched it land, you saw the small nod that means understood, and then you kept going. Another example, a clarification nobody asked for, a sentence beginning what I mean is. By the time you stop, the nod has gone, and the thing you were sure of at the start now sounds, even to you, like something you were trying to talk yourself into.
This is not thoroughness and it is not a generous instinct that went slightly too far. It is insurance being bought with the wrong currency, and that is curable.
Every extra sentence after the point has landed is paid for out of the listener's attention, and attention is the one account you cannot top up mid conversation. Worse, the extra sentences carry information you did not intend to send. A point stated once reads as settled. The same point stated three ways reads as a point its owner is not sure will survive on its own. This is the second dimension, Message, and specifically the decision about what to leave out, which is the harder half of the dimension and the half almost nobody practises.
I sat in on a request that should have taken one sentence. He needed two extra days on a deliverable and he had every reason to get them. He asked, then explained why, then explained the explanation, then pre-empted an objection nobody had raised. Four minutes in, his manager was no longer deciding about two days. She was wondering what else was wrong with the project. The request was refused, and it would have been granted at the thirty second mark.
The instruction people are given here is to be thorough, and to anticipate questions. That advice is sound in writing, where the reader can skim and skip, and it is actively harmful out loud, where every sentence is compulsory and arrives at the pace you choose rather than theirs.
The tell is easy to catch once you look for it. Notice the phrases you use to start the surplus. Does that make sense. What I mean is. Just to give you some context. Each of those is you asking for reassurance, and each of them tells the room you are not confident it stood up the first time.
There is also a compounding effect on how you are read over time. A person who states things once is treated as somebody whose statements can be relied on, so their sentences get shorter and are believed faster. A person who explains everything twice trains the room to wait for the second version, which means the first one stops being listened to properly, which makes the second one feel more necessary. The habit quietly builds the conditions that seem to justify it.
So the drill happens on paper first, where it is cheap. Write out something you have to say this week, however it comes to you. Then find the three sentences that are there to protect you rather than to inform them, and delete those three. Not the weakest sentences, the most defensive ones. Read what remains aloud and notice that it is stronger, not thinner. Do this every day with a different message, an email, a request, a piece of news you have to deliver. You are training your ear to recognise the difference between explaining and defending, and once the ear knows the difference, your mouth starts stopping on its own.
There is a Done For You version of this, applied to the conversations you are actually dreading. It sits inside the work, not on this page.
If you keep talking past your own best moment, The First Call is fifteen minutes, free, and it is a conversation rather than an assessment. You talk, I listen, and by the end we both know whether this is work worth doing. The locating itself happens in The Diagnosis. One door: saswatlife.com.
Next on the shelf: Why does my pronunciation trip me in front of people · or see the five dimensions the articles draw from.
When you are ready:
The First CallNot ready for that yet? New articles are announced on the saswatlife channel on WhatsApp.