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When tasked with writing an article that made a complex topic accessible, I quickly gravitated towards statistics. I have an extensive background in the subject and I felt confident I could write about it with ease. However, my prior knowledge actually made writing the accommodation more difficult. I had to appreciate that my audience came to this piece with less information than I did and make the explanations clear and interesting given their background, not my own. I chose to build the accommodation into a fiction so I could show through characters and action (as opposed to simple explanation) why the subject matter was so important. Within that fiction, I offered real-world examples and a hopeful vision of the future.
Date Written
October 2014
Target Audience
General, non-expert
Skills Developed
- Searching through relevant articles to find a narrow but complex topic to accommodate
- Making that complex topic accessible to an educated, non-expert audience
- Incorporating real-world examples to show the relevance of the topic
- Building a coherent and logical fiction around the accommodation