I recently put up a tweet which said:

It's easy to not notice when people exercise self control and don't say things, especially critical things.

It's healthy for your relationships to develop the skill of noticing anyway and appreciating them for it.

— Christopher Lansdown (@ctlansdown) May 3, 2024

In case Twitter ever stops working, the text is:

It’s easy to not notice when people exercise self control and don’t say things, especially critical things.

It’s healthy for your relationships to develop the skill of noticing anyway and appreciating them for it.

Then, out of curiosity, I asked my friend Ed Latimore (who, at the time of this writing, has over 200,000 Twitter followers) how he’d have written that tweet. Here’s his response (published with permission, obviously):

It’s important to notice what people *don’t* say…

Especially when tempers run high and it’d be understandable if they said anything wild.

I found the differences to be quite interesting, which is why I’m sharing it.

One obvious difference, of course, is that Ed’s version is more streamlined and easier to read. That’s partially because it’s a skill he’s worked hard at becoming good at and partially because complicated grammar is a weakness of mine. My first sentence involved a double-negative, while Ed rephrased to a single negative, which has an easier flow. The second sentence does flow more easily than the second sentence of mine, but more interesting is how much it diverges. In mine I had in mind the fairly tame, if quite common, case of people complaining or criticizing.

Ed went for the more vivid case of people being angry. The tradeoff is that this is less common—for most of us, anyway—but this makes sense to me as something that will grab attention better, which is important on Twitter since the dominant mode of reading is doomscrolling—or whatever the term for addictively scrolling while skimming to find things to interest one is. There is also an element of Ed’s brand on Twitter, which involves having grown up in the “hood” and in rough circumstances. I suspect that’s less that, though, and more about catching people’s attention.

There is still very much the same idea of noticing what a person prevents themselves from saying; one thing about the context of tempers running high is that it intrinsically suggests people doing what Dale Carnegie famously said most fools do (criticize, condemn, and complain). This does give the benefit of economy of speech, since in Ed’s version there’s no need to spend extra words. The use of “it’d be understandable if they said anything wild” also interests me because it requires imagination on the part of the reader. Exercising that imagination will predispose the reader to sympathy with the other (hypothetical) person. That’s something which was lacking in my version.

Ed’s version also makes greater use of cadence. There’s the emphasis on the word “don’t” followed by an ellipsis, indicating that the reader should take a moment to think about the implication of the sentence. Then there is the specific example; beginning it with the word “especially” serves to emphasize the first sentence as well as shape the the thoughts that the reader had on the first sentence. I can see how that would create greater sympathy between the reader and Ed, as well as making the reader feel greater ownership over the specifics that Ed then gives.

It’s very interesting to see skill at work.