You’ve spent weeks on a document. Maybe months. It’s been reviewed, rewritten and passed around the team.
The comments have been dealt with. The wording has been debated. Everybody is happy with it.
Then someone outside the project reads it and asks a question within the first minute. A question nobody inside the team thought to ask.
Most content teams have experienced some version of this.
It’s frustrating when it happens… it’s also completely normal.
The problem with knowing too much
Psychologists call it the ‘curse of knowledge’.
Once we know something, it becomes surprisingly difficult to imagine what it’s like not to know it.
A great demonstration of this comes from a study carried out at Stanford University. Participants were asked to tap the rhythm of familiar songs while somebody else tried to guess it.
The tappers thought listeners would get the answer around half the time. In practice, they were correct around 2.5% of the time
The ‘tappers’ could hear the song in their heads. The ‘listeners’ could only hear a series of taps.
Content really isn’t very different. After you’ve worked on something for weeks, the meaning feels obvious. For the reader, it often isn’t.
The closer you are to the work, the harder it can be to see
When you’ve been on a project from day one, you absorb all sorts of extra information. The meetings. The debates. The acronyms. The section that sparked three Zoom calls and five email chains before anyone could agree on the wording.
Before long, you can’t help reading the document with all that context in your head.
The reader doesn’t get any of that. They just get the words on the page.
Which is why something that seems crystal clear to the team can leave a first-time reader wondering what on earth you’re talking about.
Why good teams still miss things
Strong content teams spend a lot of time immersed in the work they do. They’re close to the subject matter. They understand the audience. They know the organisation inside out.
Those are all GREAT things.
But familiarity changes how you read. The same expertise that helps to create good content can also make small gaps harder to spot.
A simple exercise
One of the simplest ways to test whether content is working is to show it to someone who hasn’t been involved in creating it.
Take a document or section and ask them: “What do you think this is trying to say?”
Don’t provide any context first. If their answer matches your intention, you’re on track. If it doesn’t, you’ve found a problem before your audience does.
Why external eyes matter
Fresh eyes are usually treated as a final check. But they’re one of the most reliable ways to see what your audience will see.
After you’ve lived with a piece of content for long enough, you stop experiencing it the way a reader will.
Every piece of content eventually has to stand on its own.
A reader won’t have access to the conversations, decisions or explanations that shaped it. They read what’s there, not what everyone intended to put there.
Testing it with someone who lacks that context is one of the simplest ways to see how well it does.
