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Q&A Is it okay to call the reader's target audience stupid?

I sympathize with the sentiment, but no, you can't use "black humor" and "shop talk" in a book like that. Such comments have to be kept in-house and preferably not written down. We all complain abo...

posted 12y ago by Lauren Ipsum‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-13T12:00:12Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/6380
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T02:31:34Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/6380
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T02:31:34Z (about 5 years ago)
I sympathize with the sentiment, but no, you can't use "black humor" and "shop talk" in a book like that. Such comments have to be kept in-house and preferably not written down. We all complain about horrible clients and idiots at the DMV and so on, but you shouldn't actually codify that into written advice.

Users as a group are too diverse to call them all stupid. Any one of your users is expert in something which you as a designer/programmer won't understand, and the user could call you "stupid" for not grasping something which seems "obvious" in his/her field.

Your goal is to make the end result easy for any user, no matter the technical background, to understand. That does require a lot of work on your part (and the part of your readers). If you object to the idea that part of your job is to make things easier for someone else, you should change jobs.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2012-09-23T12:19:17Z (about 12 years ago)
Original score: 5