Most technical writers (and communicators in general) have an insufficient appreciation for the curse of knowledge.

This takes me back to running a World of WarCraft guild as a teenager.

We would organize "raids" maybe 3 to 4 times a week. It involved getting 40 of our guild members from all over the world to sign on at the same time, and spend hours facing off against dragons and other monsters inside dungeons. It was the most fun I'd ever had in a game, but it was also instructive. The battles were famously difficult and required a ton of coordination and strategy, and even a small mistake could get everyone killed. So our policy was that everyone in the raid had to sign onto our Teamspeak server, which was basically an audio-only Zoom call where my appointed officers and I could give orders and dictate strategy.

I very quickly learned an important lesson in communication: assume the worst. Surprisingly (to me at the time), most people who don't understand what you're saying won't stop you to tell you they didn't understand. And so I came to live by two rules:

1. If it's worth saying once, it's worth repeating. Assume people are only half listening, that they're distracted, that they're not paying attention.

2. Don't assume people know what you know. In fact, while talking, keep a second thread running where you explicitly ask yourself, "What am I saying that my listener might not know?" Then explain it.

The more I followed these rules, the better we did on our raids.

But even long after I stopped playing WoW, both of these rules have been helpful. Especially the second one, which helps overcome the curse of knowledge -- the phenomenon that occurs when a person who has specialized knowledge incorrectly assumes that others share in that knowledge.

Thinking about the curse of knowledge when communicating basically becomes second nature after a while. And then it becomes obvious when you observe other communicators who don't care about the curse of knowledge. They confidently launch into stories using obscure terminology and acronyms that nobody understands, without a care in the world for their listeners' understanding, they don't notice at all that nobody understands.

How I, a beginner developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me