Write to Reach Right: Episode 1

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

The internet is an ocean of information and people around the world are trying to fish out what they need, like or are interested in. But there is a cache, the perspectives of the writers (content creators) and the readers (beneficiaries) might not match as they expect. Did not understand? 😕 Well, I will walk you through 😃. This article is the first episode of a series of articles on problems, insights and solutions (probable) to let your writing reach the right people the right way. Lets get started🔥.

Motivation

I started writing on Medium recently and do not project myself to be an expert at suggesting people what to do and what not, yet as a writer and reader on Medium, I have some key insights from both the domains. Most of the times it is not about to learn from the expert itself cause everything and everyone has something to share and teach.

Dilemma of a writer

There are different domains of writing, but since I come from a science background lets talk about sharing content related to science and technology. For a writer who has good enough knowledge on the topic which she (unlike the default ‘he’, let’s give ‘she’ a chance today) is sharing. The dilemma is between expressing her expertise Vs simplicity of her language. As a writer she would:

• Use technically sound language to present her professionalism.
• Want to explain stuff as concise and efficient wording as possible.
• Put up some assumptions on the background of her audience (which might not work out for the audience necessarily).

As a reader I would want:

• The article to explain things in simpler language.
• Put more words to make things clear rather than difficult words and short sentences.
• The assumption of my technical background should be lower than what I actually have (very crucial, else it will just go above your head 😶).

As we can see, these expectations are not in sync with each other and can cause a reader to drop reading the article after thinking that its too long, boring or has more technicality than expected. I would like to point out that the mentioned behavior of the writer is not wrong 😌, but might not be adequate to reach the audience they target.

Solution

If you are a writer who does not necessarily want to prioritize your writing capabilities more than it’s usefulness to the actual readers, it would be best to focus on the utility of your work to the community and target more on simplicity of language and grow your level slowly as the readers themselves have adapted with your way of doing things. ShareTechnote is a great example to learn from.

The website is a huge collection of information about topics ranging from wireless communications, networks, programming languages etc., and present the data in a not so fancy static website with no advertisements (as my experience so far) bugging your experience. Take any article and skim through the content to realize yourself that the article which looked so lengthy, did actually not contain so much of an difficult-to-understand technical information 😉, primarily because it is not a research paper rather it presents every little technical bit in words with makes it lengthy to see but very easy to digest.

Thanks readers!!! This was just one short article on technical content sharing with example to illustrate the problem and a possible solution. Any comments or conflicting experiences are invited. STAY TUNED FOR MORE 😍.