“Yes they’re long but he can talk to all of us at once and when you’re done reading it, you *clearly* understand his arguments, right?” Everyone agreed.

The challenge is balancing clear messages with a clarity of intent in a day when few of us can ask our readers, audience, or “followers” to invest the time to get a holistic view of what one is trying to communicate.

Thanks for the very thoughtful comment Paul.

It’s useful to be reminded of how the quick, informal (i.e. in some respects speech-like) text communication of the internet differs from speech: you cannot finesse meaning with intonation, stress, facial expression, gestures or other contextual cues. Your recipient may read your words long after the spontaneity of your post has faded. it can be viewed and reviewed time and again – and by the whole interweb. :-O

I think this matters greatly, particularly in communication for business and education and with people we don’t know well and/or whose first language isn’t English.

For the record, this is known as contrastive stress and is definitely best avoided in written text, or at least used with caution. The use of italics/ the em tag to indicate contrastive stress can be at best ambigous