# Business and science writing should be demystifying The point should be to give as much understanding ( [[Understanding a thing has to do with intuiting the affordances of a thing]]) to another person as possible. The only way to do this is to go up and down [[The ladder of abstraction]]. The slightly weaker version of this statement is “Business and science writing should be demystifying to ‘your audience.’ [[Michael Nielsen characterizes institution building as making previously illegible things legible]] made the point on twitter that it is fine for a paper to only be understood by the people in its field. [[More context can decrease the signal to noise ratio of communication for people who already have that context]] so there is probably an inherent tradeoff. ### Examples [Jerry Neumann on Twitter: “Anyone know a no-bs guide to writing for a business context? Tired of reading analyses structured like mystery novels”](https://twitter.com/ganeumann/status/1226621308399751169?s=12) https://twitter.com/ganeumann/status/1227044247964176384 <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Business+and+science+writing+should+be+demystifying) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Business+and+science+writing+should+be+demystifying)