Wrong Omissions Will Cost You Customers (#5)

Why Missing Critical Details Destroys Trust—and How Smart Writing Builds It

Charlie Brown trusts Lucy when she promises to hold the football steady. She doesn’t lie — she just omits one crucial detail: she’ll yank it away at the last second.

Charlie Brown sprints forward.

And then? He attempts the kick and lands flat on his back.

Every. Single. Time.

That’s the same feeling users get when they follow documentation that conveniently leaves out a critical limitation. They try to complete a task, the instructions promise an easy experience, and then — WHAM. They hit a wall.

The absence of key information in documentation doesn’t just create frustration — it erodes trust. When users feel deceived, they don’t blame themselves for not knowing. They blame the product, the company, and by extension, the people who wrote about it.

But omission itself isn’t the problem. Omission is an essential tool in writing. Without it, documentation would be bloated and unusable. The real skill lies in knowing what to omit and what to keep.

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Competitive Disadvantage

A competitive disadvantage is any feature, performance metric, or characteristic that puts a product in a weaker position than its competitors. Slow load times, clunky workflows, missing integrations — these things matter. And technical documentation plays a quiet but powerful role in how those weaknesses are framed — or ignored entirely. Writers often face an unspoken directive: Don’t highlight what we do worse than the competition.

The instinct makes sense. No company wants to draw attention to its shortcomings. But omission can create more problems than it solves.

A well-informed user may be frustrated but prepared. A misled user? She feels deceived.

And when trust is broken, she leaves.

If documentation obscures limitations, users don’t just experience frustration. They feel that the company was intentionally withholding information. Over time, this erodes credibility, increases friction, and drives users to seek alternatives.

That’s why omission can either soften the blow of a limitation or make it worse. The key is knowing how to shape user perception without compromising honesty. Done