[edouard-harris]

There's a hidden advantage to writing like this. It comes up when, e.g., you're communicating on a controversial topic in a forum like Twitter with a history of forming mobs against folks who communicate on controversial topics.

Suppose an angry reader is looking for a reason to form a mob against you. If you write in simple sentences, that makes it easy for the angry reader to process your statements and go after them. But if your sentences are more complicated, the angry reader needs to decode them logically before they can justify their anger. Angry people tend to be poor at logic. So when they run into this kind of writing, they often get bored before they have a chance to get outraged. You get your message across, and the angry reader moves on to the next tweet in their feed. Everybody wins.

This doesn't work 100% of the time. But if you do it right, it cuts down on a lot of negative virality. I'm not saying this is or isn't Patrick's intentional strategy. I have no idea. It's just one among many consequences of this communication style.

[shuckles]

Nobody is trying to start a social media flash mob over nuances in wire transfer fraud. It’s his personal style, not a defense mechanism.

[atdrummond]

I wish this were true but frankly, at least on most social media sites, people will happily move forward with any kind of mob justice irrespective of the truth or one’s writing style.

I do think that precision in writing is useful for defending one’s prior claims (and for other reasons!) but I think that’s orthogonal to defending one’s self from mass action on today’s internet.