Dear Smart People — come down to Earth and explain this in our language
You are the common audience! You know how you understand things and when you don’t. You probably failed biology or math thinking you are not smart enough. It is not that simple. Yes, you probably didn’t care for the topic so you flanked it. But if you were interested and still failed, then listen up!
Teachers and students are like two different species. They speak different languages. Like French biologist expecting Russian speaking students to understand biology. Yes, some who understands French, will pass with flying colors. You see the problem?
The language teachers speak is the language how they think. They teach the topic in the order of their thinking. Lectures are the worst. Lectures only show the digested information, put in a format that teacher see it being logical, relevant, and therefore interesting.
For example, the writing. The writing is good when you have a great response from many people. Bad writing is when you have no response at all. This means either your topic is bad or readers just stopped reading because your words didn’t carry the message. The question is — what would you change?
It is all about presentation! Write in the manner of reading habits of the audience, and not in the manner of how you think.
Are you writing for the self satisfaction of your feelings or move the conversation forward? Meet your readers half the way. What is that manner of reading?
If it to process your feelings and write about your feelings, then most likely the writing will portray the style of your thinking. But if it is about moving the conversation or even CHANGE the way other people think, then you have to 1) write your piece in your thinking process, 2) find out value can it bring to others, 3) WHO are the others, 4) REwrite your piece in a language that your “others” understand.
NOT everyone can follow along your thinking process — which is usually not linear, and a bit chaotic.
“In the real world, audience will only read your work only if they find it valuable to their lives”, said Larry McEnerney from University of Chicago Writing Program. You have to carry your ideas all the way to their understanding before they can engage with it.
If they begin to argue with you but at least they speak your language — you won the jackpot.
Your ideas are useless if you are not heard and understood.
Academic writers are trained to write to their own professors, who trained them to think in their own way. But when they come out of their niche communities into the real world they get surprised. No one cares! You now have to catch the attention by relating to the common folks and their common language.
This implies to general applications:
Believe me, and it is not about dumbing down complex problems for stupid people to understand. It is just speaking different languages.
That’s why Medium writers and YouTube vide makers keep chanting — know your audience, know their needs. You are meeting the needs of your people.
The scale of what works in real world is depending on the number of people you can get on your side. To bring a change in the world you need other people.
The news is, the average person carries out the weight of a country. It is the whole machine system that makes the decision, executes and carries it through.
Basically it is the average person that actually makes a difference.
As we already saw in the past US election, quite an average intelligent person can hold the power and make changes (whether they are good or not it is another story)
So what we find is not so much that average person is less capable to understand those highly complex systems — it just that we speak to them in an alien language. Alien people need to figure out how is their language, and not the content of ideas, is limiting other people’s greatness.
So teachers please do us a favor, get down from that high throne of yours and understand your audience’s thinking processes, before blaming the current generation for failing at engaging with the real world.
