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> I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole.

I think knowing your audience is key. Am I creating something meant to be read in 90 seconds by high level leadership to reinforce the importance of the project, or to another team meant to help inform them what is needed on their end, or as an enduring detailed document record meant to show due diligence and proper protocol? I could write a document that contained all of those things and more, and no one read it.

You rarely have no idea who your audience is likely to be. Your town’s local paper, national paper, and financial paper are all written differently for different audiences and different assumptions on shared information, priorities, etc. A local paper is going to focus on impacts to Smalltown USA, where a financial paper is going to focus on market effects and will likely assume its audience has a higher baseline understanding of financial concepts than a local paper would.

People that can tell a good joke is another version of this. If it is the wrong audience or the wrong situation, that joke will fall flat. You have to be able to “read the room” to get people to laugh with you.

[brnt]

> I think knowing your audience is key.

> You rarely have no idea who your audience is likely to be.

Let's agree that it's a sliding scale, especially in corporate settings. Who's your audience when you write documentation?