- Get feedback
The first way to avoid the curse of knowledge is to keep communicating with your learners and encourage feedback.
I get excited when I get questions about a modlette I have designed. Sometimes I’ve left gaps in my communication. At other times a learner has voiced a better way to explain my writing.
2. Use plain language
To avoid the curse of knowledge, it’s a good idea to avoid gobbledygook and use plain language instead. For instance, in an article on the benefit of analogies – https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/the-benefit-of-analogies/
The School of Life defines what analogy is and gives examples:
Analogy works by picking out a feature that is clear and obvious in one area and importing it to another field that happens to be more confronting and intangible.
Take the analogical phrase “papering over the cracks” – commonly used to suggest a shoddy, incomplete, lazy or dishonest manoeuvre. It is easy to develop a vivid image in our minds of how putting up wallpaper can hide multiple defects in plasterwork. But it might be much harder to see that, in a relationship, going on an expensive holiday won’t do anything to address the daily conflicts of life together or that, at work, moving to fancy offices won’t alter the deep problems with the quality of the management team.”
3. Revise and edit
Leaving a draft for one or more days can help you see the gaps in your writing, read your draft slowly and try not to read between the lines. What’s actually written? What does each sentence communicate? And what is missing?
4. Use concrete examples
My favourite method to lift the curse of knowledge is to use concrete examples and stories to illustrate ideas …
A great example of clear communication:
- Here’s a challenge for you …
- How would you explain the idea of socioeconomic unfairness?
Socioeconomic unfairness means it’s expensive to be poor. When you don’t have much money, you can only buy lower quality products at a lower price, but such products don’t last very long. So you have to replace them more often.
Still a bit vague?
In the fantasy novel ‘Men at Arms’ by Terry Pratchette, Captain Samuel Vines gives a great explanation of socioeconomic unfairness:
“Take boots for example. He earned thirty-eight a month plus allowance. A real pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars…
But the good thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet warm and dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have cold wet feet.”
Isn’t that a great way to explain why it’s expensive to be poor?
It works so well because it reads like a story, we can visualise the poor man spending money each year on a new pair of affordable boots and still having wet feet. In ten years, the rich man spends 50 dollars while the poor man spends 100 dollars for inferior boots.
The story is concrete. It’s about boots. But even though the example only mentions boots, we can easily imagine that similar calculations work for other items too, like clothing, furniture, or household appliances.
To make your ideas clear to anyone, use concrete examples. It’ll make your learning more entertaining too.