Dear Audience of One,

As someone who’s used to designing for the user, this week’s lessons threw me for a loop. Often times, designers are taught that the user experience is everything. But this week I was hit with a piece of advice that felt completely backwards: write for yourself, and stop worrying if the reader is following along.

But how am I supposed to ignore the audience while also trying to make sure I don’t lose them?

William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, is the one who presents this contradiction. He demands that writers strip away clutter to make sure the reader isn’t confused, yet insists that writers shouldn’t care if our audience likes us. Surprisingly, it isn’t conflicting advice but actually the difference between “craft” and “attitude.”

So what is the difference between craft and attitude?

Craft is the technical side, things that allow readers to be able to access and understand content more easily. Jakob Nielsen has prepared an in-depth guide on this technical side, detailing all the ways readers scan content. If my craft is messy, due to lacking proper organizational elements like subheadings or bullet points, I may lose the reader instantly.

But attitude? That’s anything that I want to share with the reader. As Steven Pinker mentions, trying too hard to impress an audience leads to lifeless and robotic text, also known as the “Curse of Knowledge.” When writers strip away our personalities to sound smart, it only makes our readers have a difficult time reading what we publish.

So the lesson for today isn’t for me to ignore you, my audience of one, but to be authentic without boring you. Text should be designed but should maintain one’s voice. Hopefully, this will allow writers to start caring about how to make it easy for you to understand us.

Sincerely,

The Writer in Training