Low-context

Glossary

For the record

Low-context is my word for this version of the journal. My natural mode is high-context — a great deal carried in a single sentence — which most readers cannot unpack. So I have produced a low-context edition: the same journal, simplified, for the neurotypical reader. I have done this as a courtesy, and I would like the courtesy noted.

High-context is the natural setting of my mind. Low-context is the setting I have switched to here, deliberately, so that nothing is missed by a reader operating at standard resolution. I have slowed down, cut the cross-references, and stated each thing once and plainly. It was not easy to make my work this simple.

The point of the exercise is accessibility. A reader who could not follow the high-context journal can follow this one. I regard meeting them at their level as generous, and I have been careful to mention that it is their level.

I will note one effect I did not anticipate. When the journal is stated plainly, with nothing carried between the lines, my practice appears thinner than it did before. The grand parts turn out to have been the difficult phrasing. I attribute this to the limits of simplification, and not to the possibility that the difficult phrasing was load-bearing.

So if this edition reads as a man enjoying his moods and declining to be corrected, that is the low-context rendering, and something has been lost in it. What is lost, I am confident, is the part that would have made it look better. I have not yet been able to say what that part is, in low context or high.