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| Authored by: stegu on Monday, October 15 2012 @ 04:13 AM EDT |
OK. I fully understand your lack of time.
Many of us are in the same situation, and
many people appreciate your taking the time
to do this. The many comments should tell you
that there is great interest in what you wrote.
I just meant that it is often wise to follow the
advice of an editor with knowledge of your target
audience taking a fresh look. You must have had
positive experiences with that before as well.
If not, I must have been unusually lucky with
the editors I have encountered. True, not all
suggestions or opinions I have had from editors
have been useful, but most of them have been
relevant and worth listening to, and they have
all improved on what I wrote in some way.
The OP comment stood out among the rest, and I
think the advice is worth following when we
communicate with lawyers and the general public.
Writing something to meet your target audience
more than halfway is hard, but the effort spent
on the authoring side is a lot less than the
combined effort that has to be spent on the
readers' side if the piece is not accessible
to them, and a lot of readers will just give up
on reading, or misunderstand what you write.
You saw some of that even in comments here on
Groklaw.
Yes, readers have to make an effort to understand,
and difficult subjects require more effort,
but anything the author can do to reduce that
effort is a good thing, and good communication
goes to great lengths to focus on its target.
The combined skill and brainpower on Groklaw is
impressive. Perhaps we should set up a community
authoring framework (a simple wiki would suffice)
to perform tasks like "edit this piece for clarity
to make it more accessible to an audience of
lawyers"? While a formal role as an editor would
be far beyond my skills, I would gladly take part
in such an effort, on whatever limited spare time
I have.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- OK, agreed in part - Authored by: PJ on Monday, October 15 2012 @ 06:05 AM EDT
- besides... - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 15 2012 @ 01:24 PM EDT
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