There is a particular moment, sometimes, in a developmental editing for non-fiction meeting when I realise we have lost the civilians. That’s me… I’m the civilians.
Client X is extremely bright. He thinks quickly, makes connections at speed, and has spent years absorbing theories, models, thinkers, research, business experience, and the kind of professional knowledge that apparently breeds logarithmically overnight.
Give him a subject and, within approximately eleven seconds, we may have visited three management theorists, a behavioural model, an obscure book published in 1998, something somebody at Harvard said, a systems concept, a story about a client in Singapore, and an entirely new framework he has just invented while explaining the previous one.
I am not exactly wandering into these conversations armed only with a colouring book. I spent over 23 years in leadership and management training and materials development, and I have been editing and writing around complex ideas for decades.
Even so, Client X will occasionally rattle off a name or theory, and I have to stop him and admit I do NOT know what he just name dropped.
“Hang on. Tell me more,” I say, determined to be 100% honest about what I do or do not know.
There will be a tiny silence.
Not an unkind silence. More the silence of a man whose brain has just encountered the startling possibility that this information was not issued universally at birth.
And that is where many very clever people get into trouble when they write books.
The problem with knowing too much
Psychologists have a term for part of this: the curse of knowledge. Once we know something, we become remarkably bad at reconstructing what it felt like not to know it. Research has demonstrated that people’s own knowledge can influence their assumptions about what other people will understand or notice, even when they are specifically instructed to disregard what they themselves know.
In other words, your expertise changes the starting line.
The reader is standing at kilometre zero. You are standing at kilometre 68, waving cheerfully and shouting, “Come on, the path is obvious!”
It is obvious.
From kilometre 68.
This becomes particularly entertaining when the expert is also a rapid, associative thinker. I suspect Client X may have an ADHD-flavoured brain, although that is neither my diagnosis to make nor necessary to the argument. I do know what it is like to have an ADHD brain myself, however, which is probably why I can follow a fair number of his leaps. One idea sparks another, which fires three more associations, which reminds you of a book, which connects beautifully to something discussed two chapters ago, except now perhaps Chapter Four should actually be Chapter Seven.
Running some book-development meetings can therefore feel a little like herding squirrels through a maze. The squirrels are all exceptionally well read. They are just not going in the same direction.
Fortunately, my other professional life involved coaching, so a fair amount of developmental editing consists of lovingly tackling said squirrels to the ground and asking irritating questions such as:
“What is the actual point you want the reader to take from this?”
“Which of those five ideas is doing the work here?”
“Does the reader need to know that theory, or do you need to know it?”
“And what do we want them to understand or do next?”
These are not questions designed to make sophisticated thinking less sophisticated. They are designed to find the intellectual spine inside it.
Because complexity and depth are not the same thing.
Complexity is not proof of intelligence
Experts sometimes become nervous when an editor starts simplifying. They hear simplify and imagine dumb down. Nuance will be slaughtered. Rigour will be marched outside and shot. Their elegant conceptual model will shortly be renamed “Five Easy Tips for Being Better at Things.”
That is not what good simplification means.
Simplifying an idea means reducing the unnecessary cognitive work required to understand it while preserving the complexity that actually matters.
That is much harder than writing complicated prose.
Jargon is useful between experts precisely because it compresses enormous amounts of shared information into small packages. If two psychologists use the term working memory, neither needs a fresh three-page explanation every time. The term is efficient because both people already possess the conceptual furniture.
Put the same term in front of a reader who does not share that background and the efficiency disappears. Now the reader has another object to hold in working memory while trying to understand everything else.
Research into science and health communication repeatedly finds this problem. Jargon-heavy material is harder to process, while plain-language versions can improve understanding. A 2024 randomised trial, for example, found that plain-language versions of health recommendations improved adult comprehension. Research on jargon also suggests that unfamiliar specialist language can make messages feel harder to process and can interfere with engagement.
Plain English, then, is not the natural habitat of the intellectually underpowered. It is a translation skill. And translation requires you to understand the original extremely well.
Where Non-Fiction Developmental Editing Meets the Curse of Knowledge
This is also where people often invoke the Dunning–Kruger effect, usually accompanied by that familiar little internet graph in which idiots are apparently supremely confident, intelligent people are miserable, and wisdom lives somewhere near a small mountain labelled Valley of Despair.
Psychology, irritatingly, is more complicated than memes.
Kruger and Dunning’s original 1999 studies found that people who performed poorly in particular domains often substantially overestimated their performance. The research also found an interesting problem at the other end: high performers could underestimate their relative standing because they assumed other people were performing better than they actually were.
The more useful idea for writers is calibration.
How accurately can you judge the distance between what you know and what your reader knows? Very knowledgeable people can get this wrong too.
The expert thinks, Surely everyone in leadership knows that.
No.
Everyone at the annual conference of People Who Have Been Thinking About Leadership Since 1997 may know that.
Dave, who bought your book because his company promoted him to regional manager on Tuesday and Karen from Accounts has already threatened to resign, may not.
Write for Dave.
What Client X taught me about the expert brain
Client X is an excellent example because the problem is emphatically not a shortage of thinking. It is an embarrassment of riches.
We will begin with one useful idea. Within minutes, that idea has acquired cousins.
“This relates to X’s model,” he says.
Fine.
“And then there’s Y’s work on organisational systems.”
Also fine.
“And of course Z argues something slightly different…”
Still fine.
“And that connects to—”
“No.”
This is approximately where the developmental editor must earn her tea.
The problem is that all these connections may be valid. That does not mean they all belong on the page.
A reader cannot receive twenty years of accumulated knowledge in the same networked form in which it exists inside the expert’s head. The expert may see a great interconnected constellation. The reader sees seventeen stars and is still waiting for somebody to draw the bloody bear.
That is one of the central jobs of an expert-author: draw the bear.
- Show me which points connect.
- Tell me why they connect.
- Tell me which ones I can safely ignore for now.
Then take me somewhere.
The five-step “Would Dave Understand This?” test
When you are trying to communicate sophisticated theory without flattening it into mush, I use some version of these five checks:
- Name the problem before naming the theory. Do not begin, “According to Professor Thingummy’s Adaptive Recursive Leadership Matrix…” Begin with the experience the reader already recognises. Your executive team agreed on the strategy, yet three weeks later every department is pursuing a different version of it. Now I care about the model because I understand the problem it might solve.
- Explain the idea before giving me its label. If the reader can grasp the principle in ordinary language first, the technical term becomes useful shorthand rather than an entrance examination. We tend to notice evidence that supports what we already believe and overlook evidence that challenges it. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. Meaning first. Label second.
- Use one concrete example. Abstract ideas become far easier to understand when the reader can watch them happening. Instead of giving me four paragraphs on misaligned organisational incentives, show me Sales being rewarded for volume while Operations is rewarded for reducing fulfilment costs. Suddenly I understand why everybody is behaving perfectly rationally and the company is still setting fire to itself.
- Ask whether the name matters. If mentioning the theorist adds authority, historical context, intellectual lineage, or gives the reader somewhere useful to explore further, keep it. If you are mentioning Professor Flugelhorn primarily because you know Professor Flugelhorn, consider releasing him back into academia.
- Make the reader use the idea. The final test of explanation is not whether the reader can admire it. It is whether they can recognise it in their own world. Give them a question, diagnostic, exercise, decision, or observation that converts theory into thought.
That is the difference between simplifying content and simplifying communication. You can retain a highly sophisticated idea while making the route into it beautifully clear.
Try the dinner-table test
There is another test I like.
Imagine you have explained the central idea in a chapter to an intelligent friend who does not work in your field. Half an hour later, somebody else joins the table.
Could your friend explain the idea to them?
If they say, “Basically, she’s arguing that organisations keep treating communication as though sending the message and creating shared understanding are the same thing, and they’re not,” you have probably done your job.
If they say, “It involved alignment architecture and some chap called Klaus,” you may still have work to do.
This is one reason good developmental editing for non-fiction involves rather more than correcting sentences. With expert nonfiction, an editor often needs to act as the first intelligent outsider: knowledgeable enough to interrogate the thinking, but sufficiently removed from the author’s specialist world to notice where invisible stairs are missing.
Sometimes my most useful contribution to Client X is simply:
“I followed you from A to B. I followed B to C. I have absolutely no idea how you got from C to Madagascar, or indeed why we are there.” And I like Madagascar; I’ve even been there IRL.
Then we go back and find the missing bridge. Almost invariably, there is one. It existed in his head all along. The reader simply wasn’t issued a copy.
The strange thing about truly authoritative writing
There is an insecurity that sometimes creeps into expert books: If I make this too easy to understand, will people realise it isn’t actually that complicated?
That fear can produce prose wearing a three-piece suit to breakfast. Long words. Nested theories. Acronyms. Citations stacked like sandbags. Abstract nouns having meetings with other abstract nouns.
But the authority of an expert book does not come from making readers work hard enough to deserve the information. It comes from helping them see something they could not see before. The really impressive writer is not the person who can explain a complicated idea complicatedly. Most of us can achieve that with sufficient caffeine.
The impressive writer is the person who can say:
“Here is the complicated thing.”
“Here is what actually matters.”
“Here is why.”
“Here is what it looks like in your life.”
“And now that you can see it, here is what you can do differently.”
That kind of simplicity is not the absence of intelligence. It is intelligence that has finished the job.
Before You Send Your Non-Fiction Manuscript to a Developmental Editor
Read it once looking only for assumptions.
Every time you use a name, theory, acronym, model, piece of industry language, or idea that feels “obvious,” ask yourself whether the reader needs it, whether they will know it, and whether you have given them enough context to understand why it matters.
Then look for leaps. Where have you moved from one thought to another because the connection is automatic in your own mind? Write the missing bridge.
Finally, look at every complicated explanation and ask the slightly brutal question:
Could I say this more simply without making it less true?
If the answer is yes, do.
Your reader did not buy the book to prove they are clever enough to understand you.
They bought it because they believe you are clever enough to help them understand.
There is a considerable difference. And somewhere, Professor Flugelhorn is coping with it remarkably well.
At Harvard Ink, developmental editing for non-fiction often begins long before we worry about commas.. We help authors identify the intellectual spine of the book, interrogate assumptions, organise complex thinking, strengthen the reader journey, and turn expertise into something clear enough to travel beyond the expert’s own professional bubble.
If you have spent years becoming very good at what you do and are now discovering that getting the whole thing out of your head in a coherent order feels suspiciously squirrely, that is precisely the sort of problem developmental editing and book coaching are designed to solve.
If your book is full of strong ideas but you’re struggling to turn them into a clear, compelling reader journey, Harvard Ink can help. We specialise in developmental editing, book coaching, and shaping complex expertise into accessible, authoritative nonfiction without flattening the thinking or losing your voice. If you have a manuscript, a half-built framework, or simply a head full of squirrels, get in touch and let’s work out what the book is really trying to say.
Thank you for reading Part 2 of our new series – The Indie Author’s Publishing Survival Guide. To read our other posts on self-publishing for authors and writers, they’re right here:
Read Part I of the series here.
Read Part III of the series here.
Originally published on LinkedIn August 18 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/indie-authors-publishing-survival-guide-curse-expertise-why-bgv1e/
