Write for one reader

The essay that lands universally was written for a specific person.

The essay that aims for everyone hits no one.

This is counterintuitive because we're taught to broaden the appeal, simplify the language, lowest-common-denominator everything. The opposite is closer to truth.

When you write for one reader, a specific person you know, or could imagine in detail, your sentences get sharper. Your assumptions get more honest. Your examples get more specific. The piece reads like a private letter that happens to be visible to others.

Strangers reading the letter feel addressed. Not because the letter was for them, but because the letter was for someone, and that specificity is what creates trust.

The piece written for "the audience" reads like a press release. It hedges. It explains things the reader already knows. It builds in caveats for hypothetical objections. It sounds, in a word, like nobody.

Three rules I follow:

Pick a real person and write to them. Their name in your head. Their job, their pain, their level of context. Write the piece that would actually help them.

If a sentence is true for everyone, cut it. If it's only true for them, keep it. The pretend-universal sentences are the ones that lose voice.

Don't worry about the rest of the audience. The right people will recognize themselves in the specificity. The wrong people would have left anyway.

One reader, deeply addressed, becomes a thousand readers, lightly addressed.

The opposite never works.