Writing for the World You Want

Are you serious enough about thought leadership to take your topic seriously?

Once upon a time, writing gurus used to say we should write for people at a 10th-grade reading level. Then it went down to 8th. Then 6th-grade reading became the threshold.

Recently, I’ve seen people seriously proposing 5th and even 3rd-grade reading levels as the gold standard for their content.

There’s a reason why the movie Idiocracy still resonates after almost 20 years. In fact, it’s starting to become a documentary.

Here’s my take:

– Treat your audience as 3rd-graders, and you’ll get 3rd-grade engagement and decision-making.
– If you fetishize inattention and downgrade your work, you are part of the problem. You’re reinforcing a culture that can’t think and can’t engage with serious ideas.
– If you stop reading like a child, you’ll actually see “writing for a child” and other writing bromides for what they are. I suspect most writing experts know it and would be quite happy to keep things as degraded as possible instead.

Ask yourself this:

What if you thought, created, and wrote for the audience and world you want to have instead of those that others want you to be stuck having? If you threw away all the crap, what would happen?

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