Ways to Uplift the “Curse of Knowledge”

If you are unable to understand what its like not to understand something a topic, discipline, craft then you are ‘cursed.This makes it hard for you to communicate that knowledge to less informed people. For example think of a lawyer who can’t give you straight, clear, complete answer of a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience makes him unable to fathom how little you know. So you can’t understand when he talks to you in abstraction.

Curse of knowledge affects all, especially when you write, its particularly dangerous over paper because readers can’t ask questions and writers can’t gauge reactions.The curse can sneak its way into landing page, web page, a blog post, email, that’s is why anyone who writes should revive right now.

The more you know about the Curse of Knowledge the more you are unlikely to fall victim of. Experts from top seo company in atlanta suggests 7 ways through which you can protect yourself from the curse of knowledge.

Know your audience’s base subject knowledge

You need to shape your approach on the basis of how well your audience understands the subject. So do your research, if their base knowledge is good, you can skip the fundamentals whereas if they know little about the subject then you have to start from the beginning.
Creating a detailed target persona would help you to determine your audience’s base knowledge. It will provide you a background to write in away people understand and appreciate. You can take help of experts from best Atlanta seo company in creating detailed personas.


Tone down your vocabulary

Using idioms, jargon and big fancy words in your writing is not a good idea always because if people can’t understand you they will inevitably tune out and turn off. And then all your writing efforts will go in vain. So, don’t pepper your writing with the heavy, fancy words. Use the language and words which clearly state its meaning  and people can understand it easily.


Tell a Story

Before the era of writing, people used stories to tell history. For thousand of years stories helped to spread the information. Today also stories are very impactful. People love stories because it help them to see the world with different lenses and even put themselves into the characters, emotions and learnings. 

A well told story which follows the order, a beginning, a middle and an end makes it hard for Curse to sneak its way in.


Ditch the abstractions

Leaders usually speak in abstraction because their experience help them visualize broad concepts. For example, a Chief customer Officer can say something like - ‘Our aim is to provide callers with the best customer experience ever.’ This sounds great but what does it mean? How it differentiates you from your competitors? These days for its necessary to differentiate yourself from the crowded space and for that you need to be specific. For example :Our aim is to answer every phone call to the customer service department within four rings and to resolve non-emergency calls within 7 minutes.’  so you need to be concrete, its comforting to people.


Provide Examples

Examples can out your concepts into perspective. In any case, examples make sense of things, using information you already know to forge connections. Example enables people to relate the things to what they already know and thus helps them better understand a new concept.

Use visuals

About more than 60% users are visual learners which means they absorb information better and faster when images are used to explain it. Hence power point presentations, infographics and whiteboard videos do a great job.These provide compelling visual content to educate and  engage  people from the boardroom to the web page. Including visual content to your messaging is great way to appeal to nearly two-third of the audience.


Get an outside point of view

You write, edit , reread , rethink, rearrange, reformat. And repeat. That’s what writing is.  This can be an intense process which can leave your message over processed, meaning you can only get it. Therefore you should get an outside point view even if they are not your target audience. You can ask your friends to give your writing a once over, they can serve as a barometer for comprehension.


Therefore when you write about your area of expertise, try to focus on less-informed version of yourself. It will let you to be sympathetic to your readers and the challenges they face because once upon a time you were there too.

More info : 10seos.com