Brilliant concept: Curse of Knowledge – thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Incidentally, I found your blog on Alltop, which I think can be a wonderful source for new followers.

To comment on your “layering” reply to David, above, I think one absolutely needs to bear in mind the varied experiences (technical expertise, in this case) of one’s audience.

In journalistic and corporate writing, best practice is to tell the gist of the story in the headline, add some of the context in the sub-head, then round out the major relevant information in the lede. Everything that follows should simply add more finite details for those who care to read on.

Though I’m not a technical writer by training, I’ve read enough technical manuals to state that the most helpful ones follow this layered approached.

Thanks for a great post.

Tom Roux
Editor-at-Large
The Business Insider Blog (http://www.TimRosaBlog.com)

However most technical writers are familiar with the idea of layering information, so perhaps the first (top?) layers are the ones where we can make the idea stick, and then expand on it in more detail later on for those readers that get the idea but want/need the detail?

http://davidbarneswork.posterous.com/one-man-writes-on-healing-the

I recently got listed on AllTop. Do you find it brings much traffic? I’ve been surprised — Twitter remains by far my biggest traffic source.

Another problem I see is that technical writers are just too technical in their approach. The goal of being precise forces a writer to be somewhat abstract, which goes against many of the concepts in Made to Stick.