8 ms·

> The article is pretty vague Yep. I think they are trying to write for too broad of an audience. It is spending a lot of ink trying to get people to care who

> The article is pretty vague Yep. I think they are trying to write for too broad of an audience. It is spending a lot of ink trying to get people to care who did not already know a fact like > The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in both ancient Egyptian and Greek, allowed linguists to finally crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century. --------- [EDIT] Actually, a question for those who are better at writing than I: When imagining the reader for your article, why would you assume it included someone who did not know what the Rosetta Stone did on a basic level?

bombcar 5y ago
If you don’t know your audience- it’s often better to assume too little than assume too much. Of course writing on the Internet allows you to simply hyperlink terms that may be unfamiliar.
- kragen 5y ago
  If you live in Argentina, it's obvious that San Diego is better-known than San Bernardino, but nowhere nearly as well known as Los Angeles, but that most people don't know that Compton is in Los Angeles. If you live in San Bernardino you may not know any of these things, so if you're writing an article for a general audience, you might feel the need to explain to your reader that Los Angeles is a large city in Southern California, especially after someone complains they don't know where San Diego is.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I used to live near there, and it reminds me that the further you get away from LA the more general "where you're from" becomes. At some point if someone asks where you live you say "LA" even if you're hundreds of miles from there, as it's the reference point they'll know.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    Ah. This makes sense. If the author is heavily involved in the archaeological linguistics community they would indeed not know how well-known the Rosetta Stone is.
Koshkin 5y ago
Reading a recent article in Quanta Magazine about (co)homology, I had to ask myself a similar question: Why would you assume that anyone who is reading this does not know what algebra (the subject) is? (Also similarly, I remember some SciAm pieces on the Standard Model assumed that the reader might not have any idea about atoms.)

bombcar 5y ago

If you don’t know your audience- it’s often better to assume too little than assume too much. Of course writing on the Internet allows you to simply hyperlink terms that may be unfamiliar.

kragen 5y ago
If you live in Argentina, it's obvious that San Diego is better-known than San Bernardino, but nowhere nearly as well known as Los Angeles, but that most people don't know that Compton is in Los Angeles. If you live in San Bernardino you may not know any of these things, so if you're writing an article for a general audience, you might feel the need to explain to your reader that Los Angeles is a large city in Southern California, especially after someone complains they don't know where San Diego is.
- bombcar 5y ago
  I used to live near there, and it reminds me that the further you get away from LA the more general "where you're from" becomes. At some point if someone asks where you live you say "LA" even if you're hundreds of miles from there, as it's the reference point they'll know.
- afarrell 5y ago
  Ah. This makes sense. If the author is heavily involved in the archaeological linguistics community they would indeed not know how well-known the Rosetta Stone is.

Koshkin 5y ago

Reading a recent article in Quanta Magazine about (co)homology, I had to ask myself a similar question: Why would you assume that anyone who is reading this does not know what algebra (the subject) is? (Also similarly, I remember some SciAm pieces on the Standard Model assumed that the reader might not have any idea about atoms.)