Write for One Reader Not Everyone
The fastest way to make your writing worse is to write for an imaginary, sophisticated audience. The fastest way to make it better is to write for one specific reader often yourself.
"Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you're lost." Paul Graham
Steven Pressfield captures the foundational insight in a single sentence: "Nobody wants to read your shit." This is not cynicism it is the starting point for empathy. Once you internalize that the reader is donating their scarce time and attention, you stop trying to impress and start trying to serve. Writing becomes a transaction: you owe the reader something worth their investment.
The practical consequence is to write the thing you yourself want to read. Graham's advice for makers applies directly: "Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use." When you write for yourself, you have a built-in quality filter you know when something is boring, unclear, or unnecessary because you can feel it as a reader. When you write for an imaginary audience, you lose this filter and start guessing at what "they" might want, which produces bloated, unfocused work.
Pressfield identifies this pattern in advertising as "Client's Disease" the client is so in love with their product that they load up brilliant campaigns with irrelevant details no one else cares about. The cure is the same in any domain: understand that the reader does not share your context, your enthusiasm, or your patience. Scott Adams distills the technical version: "Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences." Streamline your message. Make it so compelling that a person would have to be crazy not to read it.
Takeaway: Before you write for the world, write the piece that you wish existed for yourself then ruthlessly cut everything a reader would skip.
See also: The Pyramid Principle for Clear Communication | Writing Is Thinking Made Visible | Culture Wars Are Won Over Generations