This prose desperately needs an editor and a rewrite pass, which would be unremarkable in technical fare—but in an argument about the information density of prose, it severely undermines the author’s trustworthiness.
“The answer is not immediately obvious. Indeed, word problems in these forms are not only long-winded but also prone to misinterpretation. I may have wanted to ask you something but you may have understood (and answered) something else entirely. Moreover, I may have misspecified what I originally wanted to ask. All in all, this seems like a rather unfortunate way of asking questions of such nature. What if I change it to something like this instead:”
Could shrink to:
“The answer is not obvious. Wordy descriptions of math problems are prone to miscommunication—and tediousness. Compare:”
Guilty as charged. I'm definitely aware of my tendency to repeat things. In my admittedly flimsy defense, it stems from my fear of being misinterpreted.
Steven pinker has a TED talk about the ambiguity of language. And he makes a compelling point that the ambiguity in language is actually a feature, rather than a bug.
The reason being that the ambiguity allows for the renegotiation of relationships.
