Insights
24/06/2024
It was dark. In an abandoned house, a well-meaning tech engineer was poised to change the world. But, horror – she was suddenly struck by the curse of knowledge. And she blurted out 850 words of impenetrable tech waffle. Her new widget sank without a trace. Its brilliance was buried and lost forever.
Seriously though, the curse of knowledge is a for-real problem. Particularly in the tech world where we often play.
People are often so deep in their subject, they’re blinded by their own expertise. So they end up writing copy that can’t be understood.
It’s a recognised psychological effect that says once you know something, it’s virtually impossible to remember what it’s like not to.
The Tappers and Listeners test is a great, simple and slightly maddening experiment that demonstrates the curse of knowledge.
It was devised by Stanford University student Elizabeth Newton in 1990. She divided her volunteers into two groups, tappers and listeners. The tappers had to tap out a song on a desk..The listeners had to guess what song was being tapped out.
But there was a nice twist. Newton asked the listeners how often they thought they’d guess the songs being tapped out. They guessed 50%, assuming that for every two songs being tapped out, they’d get one right.
They were shocked when actually they guessed the song correctly just three out of 120 songs. That’s a strike rate of just 1 in 40. They were right just 2.5% of the time.
The strike rate was so low because the tapper can hear the whole song, the rhythm and all the harmonies in their head. But they forget that all the listeners can hear is a bunch of taps on a table.
On the other side, the listeners are blind to their own inability to guess the songs and are overconfident.
The long-running panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks ran a regular feature that played on this idea. Even professional musicians struggled with the notion of tappers and listeners.
So you know the curse of knowledge exists. But what can you do about it? Annoyingly not all that much. It’s a blind spot in our brains. The best we can do is come up with some coping mechanisms.
Why is this a problem in writing?
When experts write about a product or service, they’re often under the spell of the curse of knowledge. They have so much detail about the subject in their heads, they can’t imagine the reader doesn’t have that knowledge too. Like the tappers, they’re banging out their beat and can’t understand how you can’t hear their tune.
This goes a long way to explaining why so much writing, particularly in tech, or other specialised fields, is so hard to understand. Because it’s hard for the writer to un-know what they know.
One good visual explanation of how to approach writing that defeats the curse of knowledge is this famous line reduction of a bull, by Picasso.
Picasso drew an image of a bull. Then, he removed a layer of detail at a time. Until finally, he couldn’t remove one more line and still have a recognisable drawing of a bull.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry wrote, “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
As a writer, you need to start from that minimal image. Think of the most basic starting point then gradually add layers of detail. Create an explanation of your subject with enough detail for a beginner to understand it.
Just like in Picasso’s drawing you can gradually see a fully fledged bull come into existence from just a few simple lines.
The challenge is to find that perfect place where you don’t say too much and you don’t say too little. You don’t bore or baffle your audience but you explain enough too.
Avoiding the curse of knowledge is one the best reasons to hire a professional copywriter. Someone with an outside perspective, unburdened by the curse of knowing too much. Someone able to separate the trees from the wood, (or the bull from the not-bull).
The curse of knowledge is a real thing. Tap, tap, tap us up to get professional help in overcoming it.
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