3 ms·
"Think about what your readers might already know." This alone is an excellent starting point. You know the feeling of dismay when someone starts talking bene
by gjvc 6y ago
"Think about what your readers might already know."
This alone is an excellent starting point. You know the feeling of dismay when someone starts talking beneath your level of understanding and you fear they'll never go above it? Thinking about what your audience (written or spoken) might already know is the intelligent, considerate, and efficacious thing to do.
- brundolf 6y agoAnd the opposite is exceedingly frustrating: when someone starts explaining something in terms of base concepts you've never even heard of, and you have to stop them every few seconds to fill in the blanks (and then some of those explanations have holes of their own, etc). In some cases you may be so new to a topic that you don't even know which questions to ask, so it's impossible for you to shepherd them into telling you what you need to know.
- jacobr1 6y agoThis is when I find good teachers/explainers switch to analogies - however imperfect they might be.
- anchpop 6y agoI'm writing a primer on music theory, and I have this same fear. I resolve it in three ways: 1) I try to make the writing entertaining enough that people won't mind reading something they already know 2) I added an anchor tag saying "click if you already know this stuff" 3) I added tooltips explaining vocabulary words, so if you skipped a section and end up not knowing everything you thought you did, you can use the tooltips to refresh your memory. These three factors I think combine in a really nice way. I'm excited to post it here when I'm done with it.