Guidelines on accessible Writing for Neurodivergent people

Introduction

Writing well requires knowing whom you are writing for. So, before you start writing, ask: whom am I writing for? If your audience contains Neurodivergent people, should that change how you write? It turns out that thinking about writing for Neurodivergent people can make your writing easier to read for everyone, and this Writing Guide will help you do that.

The Curse of Knowledge

The curse of knowledge is about how we forget what it was like not to know something, making us poorer communicators. Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe an exercise that Elizabeth Newton developed to explain the curse of knowledge:

In 1990, a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton illustrated the curse of knowledge by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener.” Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess the song.

Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%. But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners…