Better still is to be attentive to, and sometimes explicitly solicit, feedback from your audience. General rules like these are useful with enormous audiences,

Better still is to be attentive to, and sometimes explicitly solicit, feedback from your audience. General rules like these are useful with enormous audiences, because they are so heterogeneous that you have to play to the average. But even in that case, your sense of the average should be getting continually updated, people samples will differ -- Chicago is different from Miami, grad students are different from management types, 2023 audiences are different from 2018 audiences, etc.