Here are a handful of answers derived from personal experience of myself and others:
* lack of practice; of reinforcing feedback in the form of pushback when not making sense and approval when making sense; perhaps because etiquette makes us too nice to respond in a tight feedback loop
* or a failure to learn from that feedback when provided, because distracted or not viewing it as important, or something to do with excessive dopamine-stimuli that makes longer-term learning difficult, or by nature.
* or, because communication is not so much about precisely expressing things as it is about saying enough to allow your counterparty to produce a mirror of your own mental model, a poorly calibrated sense of what other people know, due to mostly being around people who think very similarly to them
* an overactive mind that has a lot of different things to say—whatever comes to mind—and no particular training in how to organize all those things
I benefitted immensely from a presentation a coworker once gave on the "consulting pyramid" style of writing. In short, your thinking is constructed of "data > arguments > conclusion", and you actually come by those data and arguments in a somewhat random order; if you present an idea exactly as you came up with it it will be a complete mess.
Instead, always lead with the conclusion, then a few top-level arguments; then build on the arguments in more detail; then supply data.
This is amazingly general. In writing you can create your argument exactly like this, with increasing detail / volume at each level. In verbal communication, supply the lower, larger levels only if asked.
It seems that having somebody tell you this stuff one time is enough to shake a person out of the mode of "say whatever they're thinking as soon as they think it."
It also helps to recognize rambling and incoherence as confusion, and take that as a cue to go write the whole thing down and organize it.
* lack of practice; of reinforcing feedback in the form of pushback when not making sense and approval when making sense; perhaps because etiquette makes us too nice to respond in a tight feedback loop
* or a failure to learn from that feedback when provided, because distracted or not viewing it as important, or something to do with excessive dopamine-stimuli that makes longer-term learning difficult, or by nature.
* or, because communication is not so much about precisely expressing things as it is about saying enough to allow your counterparty to produce a mirror of your own mental model, a poorly calibrated sense of what other people know, due to mostly being around people who think very similarly to them
* an overactive mind that has a lot of different things to say—whatever comes to mind—and no particular training in how to organize all those things
I benefitted immensely from a presentation a coworker once gave on the "consulting pyramid" style of writing. In short, your thinking is constructed of "data > arguments > conclusion", and you actually come by those data and arguments in a somewhat random order; if you present an idea exactly as you came up with it it will be a complete mess. Instead, always lead with the conclusion, then a few top-level arguments; then build on the arguments in more detail; then supply data.
This is amazingly general. In writing you can create your argument exactly like this, with increasing detail / volume at each level. In verbal communication, supply the lower, larger levels only if asked.
It seems that having somebody tell you this stuff one time is enough to shake a person out of the mode of "say whatever they're thinking as soon as they think it."
It also helps to recognize rambling and incoherence as confusion, and take that as a cue to go write the whole thing down and organize it.