You are very welcome here, and sorry that it has taken so long for me to respond to you – things have been very bust for me over the last couple of weeks.

I think that I need to develop my editing skills, like you’ve done.
Right now, my editing skills will generally still extra qualifiers into my writing, because I want to be sure that I’m not misunderstood. I need to learn that others will still understand me if I take all the qualifiers out.

I think that will take some practice!

James

It’s surprising – at times, I’ve deleted three qualifying statements from emails that are only several sentences long.

If you mean that the style is like a bumbling Hugh Grant character, well then maybe. Although how many people do you know who are like Hugh’s characters in real life?

My style of speech maybe a bit like it, but I don’t come across many others!

I suddenly saw your comments on this general subject in a different light.

You question whether my use of qualifiers in text is an Aspie thing. It isn’t – and I’ve never really seen it as such, although I concede that I may not have put that point across very well.

I think, instead, that it’s a typical human response to a given set of circumstances.

As I said in the article above, I see my use of qualifiers as a self defence mechanism. I often can’t predict how my interaction with others will be taken (that bit is definitely Aspie in my book), and so my brain puts in a mechanism to try and take the edge off any bad response. I’d expect anyone, AS or not to come up with some form of defence mechanism if faced with this sort of scenario often enough. Clearly different people will come up with different mechanisms.

So – to take this one stage further, the use of large numbers of qualifiers in writing in those with AS may be quite common, but I don’t see it as a trait. I see it as a typical human response to help those who use it cope with their Aspie traits.

Does that make more sense?

Wordiness: I read a lot of long aspie posts that are still very concise. The subject requires going into a fair amount of depth, but it’s often done with economy of words. Definitely not flowery. As for me, female, by the way, my short posts are regard for the attention span of readers, laziness, and, now that I think about it, the challenge of saying as much as possible in as few words as possible.