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At 10:14 AM 11/17/97 -0500, you wrote:
> Um, I don't think I'd take that teaching to heart...
> The surest way to lose your audience is to treat them like idiots.
>Well, OK, maybe passive voice is surest, but treating them like idiots is
>a close second. It's entirely possible to have a specialized audience
>regardless of their education level.
> If you "talk down" to your audience, it's likely that you'll lose
>them because they'll make the fairly logical leap that, if you don't know
>who you're talking *to,* you also don't know what you're talking *about.*
> I ran into this revising a manual for a water utility. The readers
>were HS grads or equiv--with probably an avg of 10+ yrs in the water
>treatment business. The contractor (engineering firm) who I was hired to
>clean up after let it be known that they were writing at an 8th grade
>level--guess how many people read *that* manual!
> IMO, there is no substitute for audience anaysis up front. While
>there are better and worse ways of doing that analysis, assuming they're
>idiots isn't on the list at all.
>
I think there's a vast difference between "writing down" and writing to a
level, although you're right that the distinction is often lost on the
clumsier writer and/or boss. Newspapers, after all, are generally written to
an 8th grade level, and PhDs don't avoid them because of that. In the
example you cited, your audience may well have been too well-versed in the
subject to take kindly to the phrasing. But when you say "Guess how many
people read it," does that mean somebody checked to see how many read it? Or
is your rhetorical question a vent of frustration? Did you get back numerous
nasty comments from the field?
Writing to the level doesn't mean "baby talk". That's demeaning even to new
readers. It means shortening sentences, using fewer syllables, using
contractions, friendly construction, and not making assumptions about what
the user already knows. I've known a good many readers with advanced degrees
who bubbled over on getting something truly readable that was actually
pitched to a junior high school level.
Tim Altom
Vice President, Simply Written, Inc.
317.899.5882 (voice) 317.899.5987 (fax)
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