Verbosity

You have a friend / family member / colleague whom you love dearly, or at least like, who is articulate, doesn’t repeat themselves endlessly, and has a reasonably expressive face or voice.

But oh man, can they talk the hind leg off a donkey.  You wish that they would cut to the chase in the drama they’re telling you about, rather than giving you the history of every character, and a blow-by-blow account of every little thing everyone said and did.  And you also wish that they wouldn’t stop-start in their telling of the story to give you the back story to the event in question.

What’s going on here?

Autists tend to like clarity.  We like it for ourselves and we like to give it to you.  The way we think it's easiest to give you clarity is to give you context.  Lots of context.

Because we have already hyper-analysed the event we’re telling you about, we have decided that these things are important for context and clarity.  Part of the problem is that we can forget that our audience does not already know certain things, so partway through we will feel the need to ‘get you up to speed’ by filling you in on the back story.

Assuming this habit grates on you enough, if you have a good enough relationship with the storyteller, tell them how you would have told the story.  Let them know which things you needed to know and which you either didn’t need to know or would have been happy to ask for more info about.  This will (a) help the storyteller not to lose their audience due to verbosity; and (b) you won’t be grinding your teeth as you politely wait for them to finish.

If you thought (b) was bad, chances are that if (a) happens then, when you return to the storyteller later, you are likely to find that they remember where their story was cut short and Will Continue It from that point.  If you don’t want that to happen, don’t avoid them, just let them know how to tell the story more succinctly.