A few days ago, I read an article and felt frustrated by the time I reached the end. Apart from the parts where the author spoke from personal experience, I hadn’t retained anything.
I looked at the comments. One “great article” after another... Help, what did I just read?
I reflected on it and realized a few things.
First, I don’t work in the industry the article was about. As an interested outsider, I’m still inexperienced.
Second, very little of what the article described intersects with my life. That also explains why I could remember the author’s firsthand account but not the rest.
Finally, the article used a lot of industry terms, including English abbreviations.
So, it was inevitable that I wouldn’t remember it—or, more accurately, wouldn’t understand it.
That made the article’s two characteristics pretty clear.
First, it had a high reading barrier. Its target readers had to be people with several years of experience in the field; people who had just entered the industry might not even fit its reader profile. I don’t know whether that was intentional or not. (The so-called information bubble: I know it, so I assume everyone knows it.
Second, its language was professionalized and industry-specific. In other words, it wasn’t “readable” within the range of what most people can easily understand.
This experience made me think of two other things.
I recently worked on a podcast episode with a VC (venture capital) partner and the founder of a listed ToB (to business) company. The founder said their PR (public relations) team currently had only three people. Anything the PR team published externally had to follow one rule: no adjectives.
At the time, I was stunned. What difference could using—or not using—adjectives make? I’ll leave you to imagine or think about it.
Mentioning adjectives reminded me of an American writer named Seth Godin.
I discovered him while learning about content marketing. He has quite a reputation in content creation and distribution—or at least, he appears frequently on social media. What surprised me was that he barely uses social media platforms. The only one he uses is his blog.
When I first heard him on a podcast, my immediate reaction was: Wow, this person speaks in such a down-to-earth way. I later learned that Seth Godin tries to explain deeper ideas with the simplest words possible, and that he also barely uses adjectives. Some people say his content is written at the language level of a 10- or 11-year-old native English speaker—wow, no wonder it feels so friendly to me.
“Write the way you speak.” That’s his content-creation philosophy.
It made me wonder: can we make content “the way we speak”?
Or even if we don’t make content sound like speech, could we at least proactively lower the reading barrier for readers?
Is there really a content-creation filter that says, “My target audience isn’t you”?
This reminded me of a recent conversation with Gemini about the idea of a super app for language learning in the AI era: one that keeps the course structure provided by the current system while also embedding AI-agent learning assistance for independently exploring and designing learning content. The latter could be handed off to any AI tool currently on the market, but what I really need is to be able to ask it directly how to pronounce and read a phrase or a word—even have it correct my pronunciation—instead of having to go to another app for help.
Gemini pushed back, saying I couldn’t have both fish and bear’s paw. I was already “tearing” the product apart at the question of “Who exactly are you serving?” Marketing, design, and operations would clash; managing the systematic-course team and the AI team would be difficult; and real-time teaching (reading/pronunciation) would be hard to design across the front and back ends (and boring too?)…
Whether its objections were reasonable or not (they were, hhh), it was clearly arguing with me from a Silicon Valley model, while my idea was very Chinese: “one app, one core function” VS “one app, one ecosystem.”
...It’s pretty interesting.
Seth Godin also inspired me to think that, whatever we explore, we don’t have to search for one fixed answer. Feeling “Wow, this is interesting” is already 100% valuable. Because behind “interesting” is the brain actively making connections and integrating existing and new ideas, right?
Oh right, one last thing: a barrier always exists. It can only be high or low.
But it varies from person to person, from the ground they’re standing on, and from the content being created.
P.S. About the article I mentioned above: the author only had to add two more actions for its readability and reach to improve immediately. Those two actions were: briefly explain specialized terms at the end of the article, and add the Chinese meaning in parentheses after English abbreviations.