Writing Tip 17 - Respect the Reader's Emotional Intelligence

I once worked in a field where I assisted young people with a diagnosed intellectual disability to gain open employment. It was a great eye-opener to learn that an intellectual disability does not equate to a lack of emotional or intuitive understanding, and that in some cases intellectually gifted people seemed to fall further behind in this other kind of intelligence than many of the people I was assisting into work.

My 'clients' taught me many things. In one instance, I was assigned to help a young man learn a particular route. He was learning how to independently use the bus and find his way around the city. We were to find the way from the bus stop to the train station in the city, where he could already independently catch the train home. The 'transport training' went something like this: 

Me - 'Now which stop do we get off at? Where do we go now? Where do we turn? Do you know the name of this street?'

He was very good. He didn't make a single wrong turn.

When we reached the destination, he turned to me and said with a worried expression, 'Will you be able to find your way back?'

It was a long time ago - I was young - but I haven't forgotten the lesson.

The lesson for writing is to assume that the reader is as least as emotionally intelligent as you are. This applies to children as well as adults. Writing fiction takes every bit of imagination and ingenuity that you have, and if the author is not learning something new or challenging through the writing, then it is likely that the content or ideas will be too banal for the reader.

What this doesn't mean is complicated writing. The writing still needs to be clear.

Writing Prompt

Like many of these, this is more of an editing, than a writing, prompt. Check through your work for instances of over-explanation, where you have assumed that you need to interpret or explain the meaning of an action or conversation, instead of allowing the action or conversation do its own work. (Remember, less is more. Except in those instances where it is less, of course!)