Frank Kogan

I won't be joining in on the reading, I'm afraid, but I entirely agree about stating and explaining the ideas. I think one difficulty is that there are people in our circles who know vastly more than I do about the subject, and when you are an expert it's easy to forget that some readers know less than you are used to being able to take for granted - today a colleague (I work for what is basically a software house), in a meeting with end users, said we were working on stored procedures and server-side background code, and we'd be starting on the client-side code and interface after that, which he seemed to think was an explanation. Anyone in our department would fully understand that, but I intervened to explain a little more about what that meant, and used what we had just been discussing (a new process and screen design) as an example of what happened where.

There is another, more difficult, problem for experts in this kind of conversation. Not a great parallel, but if I am talking about a cartoonist to another expert (if you'll forgive my claiming that status) I might reference a number of artists they have learnt something from, mentioning the narrative flow and use of light of Eisner and the dynamic anatomy of Gil Kane and the action choreography of Ditko and so on, and the same for writing and for characters and so on, without explaining what I mean by narrative flow in this context or who Eisner is or why he was important or what the similarities are or how the newer cartoonist uses these techniques. Now if I'm talking to someone less expert, I have the choice of not mentioning this at all or explaining all of this. If I'm writing a quick post on LJ, it'll be the former most times. An expert sees so many aspects and tangents and connections, and it can be hard to get the right balance between discussing the ideas reasonably fully without spending days writing thousands of words.

Obviously I am in the equivalent position, in this discussion, of never having heard of Ditko or Eisner or having a clue what many of the specialist terms mean - perversely, this can mean a tendency to overuse some of the ones I have some grasp of, but it mostly means I soon get lost when the specialist terms start taking over, which I think they did on your ILX Kuhn thread.