We’re popping in this week with a short but important reminder about the curse of knowledge.
Our editing team has been working their way through two projects for short-term clients this month.
The scope of work for each client was for our team to go through content created in-house and see why it wasn’t connecting and engaging.
To be honest, that’s always a bit of a heavy lift. Especially these days as Google seems to be a bit topsy-turvy.
But one common denominator we are finding with both projects is senior living copywriting that isn’t written for the average older adult and their families.
We refer to it as the curse of knowledge or knowledge curse. It happens when copy is well-written from a literary sense, but fails because it’s crafted in a way that leaves people scratching their head.
If you’ve worked in the senior care industry for a while, you know how riddled our language is with acronyms and clinical phrases and terminology that families just don’t understand.
It takes a conscious effort to speak to and write to people who are new to this journey…
When your content is created in-house, it’s a red flag that is often missed.
Even if you pass your content around to have other folks on your team read it, they’ll likely be unable to spot it, too.
Identify the Senior Living Jargon
We’ve written about the senior living jargon challenge many times on our blog. (That linked article goes all the way back to 2013!)
But it’s still one of the biggest mistakes we see people making online and off: writing copy that just isn’t clear and concise for people unfamiliar with this industry.
So, what can you do to help ensure your content is truly beneficial to seniors and their families?
Here are a couple of ideas:
- Have a fresh set of eyes experienced at spotting these mistakes audit your content
- Create a list of jargon and terminology that families won’t know and do a search for it on your site
- Make sure your website has a glossary of terms and link to it wherever appropriate
- Line up a few folks outside the industry to be your proofreaders/editors
- Take advantage of the tools your blogging platform offers for scoring readability, not just SEO
It’s a critical part of your website or blog’s success, and one you will likely need to remind yourself of before any new content is published.
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