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Don’t Assume Your Audience Knows What You Know
If your audience doesn’t know what you’re talking about, your message will fail
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How do you feel when you’re reading an article, listening to a speaker, or in a conversation, and someone makes a reference to something that flies over your head?
I still vividly remember a conversation I had with one of my congregation’s matriarchs decades ago when I was a new Christian and had attended only a few Bible studies. She was telling me about an upcoming study of Job and said, “And we all know how Job was.”
I’m not sure who she meant by “we,” but I didn’t know.
And from the way she said it, I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know.
A dear friend who is also a client often drops references to people or Biblical events in what she writes without providing sufficient context for what she’s writing to make sense if the reader doesn’t know what she knows. She’s gotten used to me telling her, “This is a great message, but you need to identify that person or explain this situation.” It doesn’t occur to her as she’s writing that some people may not have…
