Your audience doesn’t know what you know. You know?

This xkcd cartoon by Randall Munroe ( see original here ) from 2021 hits close to home for this communications practitioner.

It takes real sustained effort to overcome the curse of knowledge — the tendency to assume the people we’re talking to know the same things we do. It isn’t just the work of overcoming that assumption; it’s the labour of swapping out specialized jargon for plain language, explaining technical concepts or providing crucial background information.

(And don’t think of it as dumbing your content down: you’re just building the onramps your audience needs to get up to speed.)

Even then, the work isn’t done. We don’t just have a bias toward assuming people *know* as much as we know about a topic; we have a bias toward believing they *care* as much about it, too.

So add to our job the work of helping people to understand why this topic that’s so important to us should matter to them as well: connecting it to their own lives and values.