>> I like to delude myself that this is one of the things I'm good at.
> 
> It wouldn't surprise me to find out that is the case.  What you wrote 
> after this quoted sentence confirms it, actually.  You understand your 
> audience, and that's the most important thing to any writing one does.
> 
> People who write and don't know their audience frequently miss the mark, 
> and it shows in the reactions to what they've written.

Sometimes the hardest thing is figuring out why you're actually writing 
something. Like, I mean, I *know* I have to write this policy. But *who* 
is actually going to read it, and why?

But, IMHO, *the* hardest thing is figuring out all the stuff your 
audience doesn't know that happens to be trivially obvious to you. Like, 
I've read *so many* projects on SourceForge that tell you about all the 
fantastic features this software has but doesn't actually say... what... 
it... does! >_<

It's like describing The Gimp by saying "This program is 100% free and 
has powerful features such as Gaussian blur, edge detection and supports 
multiple colourspaces". Yes, but... WHAT IS IT FOR??

The person writing this is so busy trying to tell you all the cool stuff 
that they're completely missed the fact that an outsider might not have 
even the vaguest clue what the software is for. This is so trivially 
obvious to them that they've completely forgotten about it.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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