The Sound of Noise

bydavebux

1.5K followers

2 years ago

Have you ever tried explaining to an eighty year old non-technical person something that you find an absolute breeze to understand. My dear old mum could never understand the concept of flying faster than the sound of noise, as she called it.

What has this got to do with WA. Well, there is a very important lesson to be learnt here.

During the second world war, my mother was evacuated to a place of safety as were many thousands of young children. Far away from any risk of the area being bombed by the Germans. She was evacuated to a sleepy seaside village in Wales, called Rhosneigr. So far so good.

Then, a year later, the air ministry decided to build a super new airfield at the end of their welsh garden and filled it full of Hawker Hurricanes. The planes flew over their “safe” house several times a day. The airfield was now a perfect target for enemy aircraft.

Scroll forward 60 years and the Royal Air Force are now using the same airfield for training pilots in supersonic aircraft. Several times a day we would hear them roaring over my parent’s house.

I can’t understand it she said. If they fly faster than the sound of noise, why can we still hear them.

The speed of sound, mum.

Stop twisting my words she would say.

I ended up demonstrating on the dining room table, with the salt cellar as the aircraft and the pepper pot as the noise, both flying past her house ( a convenient place mat).

At last she grasped it, I think, but she still thought it was a trick by the government.

During my University studies we had a brilliant lecturer for some of our science work. A very, very, clever Doctor of Engineering. He was working on a way of detecting undetectable aircraft and he would often go off into the land of mystery talk.

His idea, now a working thing, was that if we can’t see the aircraft, we can at least detect the change in the air temperature where the aircraft has been. If we can detect these areas of change and follow them, we can find the aircraft. And the methods he was using to carry out this work were both fascinating (for university undergraduates) and complex. Simple, to me. But my mother would never have understood that. To mum, Pie is something with meat in it, not Pi the maths symbol.

And the same applies to us when we are writing articles for our websites or making videos.

Decide on your target audience. Exactly who are they, what level of education might they be at. Make yourself very aware of the level of understanding that your audience already has.

If you are aiming your work at level 1 basic science students then don’t make your article too complicated, full of formulas and theories on the first day, otherwise you will lose your viewers.

If it is too simple, if for example you are putting something together for the school of veterinary medicine, you need to elevate the wording above a poorly belly or hurt his foot. Your audience is going to switch off if you’re not using the medical terms to which they have become accustomed.

I will sometimes write two articles or make two videos around the same subject, a week or two apart, and allow the description and title to clearly separate the articles into easy peasy and crikey, that’s heavy.

Whichever I do, I get great feedback and very encouraging comments.

And as a bonus, some of my early viewers from 2019 who started on “easy peasy” are now on “crikey that’s heavy”. Isn’t that fantastic progress for them.

So…

Choose your target audience.

Choose just one subject or item at a time

Write to the skill level of THAT selected audience

One article for one audience, just one subject with one level of understanding

Don’t overcomplicate your work.

For me, it is far better to make two or three fifteen minute videos at different skill levels than to make just one 30 minute special that blows half the audience away with it complexity and sends the other half to sleep with the simplicity.

Choose the right playing field, target the right audience and make your work short, sharp and punchy.

Get it right and they will come back for more. I have hundreds, probably thousands of positive comments posted back to me about exactly this. They will come back, they will want to suggest the next topic, they will look forward to next week’s article.

In fact, I was ill one weekend and just 10 hours late posting the next instalment. In those ten hours I had a dozen or so comments and requests for the missing post. “Where is it Dave” “What’s happened Dave”

Hopefully this helps.

Get stuck in, respect your audience and your audience will grow.

It works

Bux