Your Writing Fails if Readers Feel Dumb (#4)

On Joe Rogan Experience (#2285), comedian Andrew Schulz made an observation about politics:

"Alright, well, I'm stupid. I'm dumb. I'm dumb then. So why doesn't somebody meet me where I'm stupid and start at least making me feel like I’m not an asshole...?"

This part of his larger statement can easily apply to technical writing.

Bad writing alienates readers because the author incorrectly assumes the readers' level of knowledge. This leaves readers wondering if they missed a step. If the author assumes too much, people disengage, stop reading, and walk away from the text. I know. I have done this myself.

Good writing does the opposite. You can make people feel capable, knowledgeable, and included.

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Scale Difficulty

In Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin arrives at Battle School completely unaware that he’s being trained for war. He’s brilliant, but he’s also a kid thrown into a complex new environment where the rules aren’t clear yet.

Colonel Graff, the officer in charge of his training, doesn’t throw Ender into combat and expect him to figure it out. Instead, he scales the difficulty — pushing Ender just hard enough to stretch his abilities but not so much that he crashes. Every lesson builds on the last.

Good writing scales with difficulty. It builds on previous knowledge, introduces new ideas step by step, and never overloads the reader.

In Cognitive Load Theory (1988), John Sweller found that working memory — the part of your brain responsible for actively processing information — is extremely limited. Most people can only retain and manipulate three to five pieces of new information at a time before cognitive overload sets in.

If explanations introduce too much information too quickly, comprehension stalls. Readers stop absorbing new ideas and start feeling overwhelmed.

In his experiments, Sweller demonstrated the following:

• Step-by-step guidance improves learning. Students who studied algebra problems with full solutions provided performed better than those who had to solve the problems from scratch.

• Poor structure reduces retention. Learners remembered less when information was presented in dense, unorganized blocks instead of clear, structured steps.

• Cognitive overload weakens problem-solving. When too much information was introduced at once, participants struggled to apply what they had learned.

The takeaway for us is to provide readers with just enough information at the right time.

But that’s easier said than done.

The more you know, the harder it is to remember what it was like not knowing. That’s where most writers go wrong: they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in their ignorant readers’ shoes.