It's well known that endless editing and re-editing is a common activity among people who write; there's a strong tendency to be dissatisfied with your own words and always think you could just make them that bit better.

I don't often write in a creative fashion, but I do frequently find myself writing functionally, in order to convey concepts clearly to people. One of my key techniques for doing this well is to try to put myself in the position of the audience, i.e. somebody who doesn't already know whatever it is I'm trying to convey; it's very easy to leave a crucial fact or step out because you've forgotten that not everybody already knows it. Trying to imagine yourself in the position of the audience doesn't completely eliminate this risk, but in my experience it goes a long way towards it.

What seems to happen for me next is that I go a bit too far; once I've made the thing I'm writing as clear as I possibly can, I'm still dissatisfied with it because I'm imagining an even stupider audience. I seem to be reasonably good at not allowing this to drag me into endless re-clarifying; I do have the ability to think ‘right, that'll have to do’ and stop editing. But for a while afterwards I look at whatever I've written and can't help thinking it's completely incoherent waffle with no clear point and no relevance to its context (if any). And then I suddenly snap back from imagined-audience mode into me mode and realise that in fact it's absolutely crystal clear. That moment, when I suddenly realise that something I had given up on trying to make the least bit comprehensible has actually made perfect sense all along, is extremely weird.

I've been having this a lot over the past few days, so it occurred to me to wonder if anyone else gets anything like this.