Some of the first properly technical content I ever created was for Cisco at the tail-end of the 90s. It was a series of whitepapers about the ins and outs of ‘multiservice networking’. It is all pretty basic stuff these days but back then the idea of a network that could manage Frame Relay, IP, ATM and even, gasp!, voice was cutting-edge stuff.
Today, I write about all manner of technical subjects: model-based AI, headless CMS, electronic access systems, automated underwriting, the list goes on.
Back then, I never heard the term ‘subject matter expert’, there were just some people who knew enough to be able to answer a bunch of questions. Now, SMEs are part of the vernacular around thought leadership and technical content.
In my experience, these are all clever, knowledgeable people. But, all too often, they aren’t writers. Why should they be?
Often, the people who understand the technical stuff best are some of the worst placed to explain it. On the audience side of the equation, the people who need to understand them are typically sceptical and short on time.
The result? The content that gets made ends up in one of two ditches. Either it’s so simplified it says nothing, or it’s so dense that only the author’s peers can follow it.
Technical B2B is where most content goes to be either boring or baffling. The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way.
There’s a well-documented cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge. Basically, once you know something deeply, you can’t remember what it was like not to know it. You forget which words are jargon. You forget which steps you’re skipping. You assume a shared context that the reader often simply doesn’t have.
Experts aren’t being lazy or arrogant when they write impenetrably. They genuinely can’t see the gap, because for them the gap closed years ago.
This is why so much technical content reads like a conversation you’ve walked in on halfway through. The writer isn’t trying to lose you. They’ve just forgotten being in the place you currently find yourself in.
Fixing this isn’t about dumbing down. It’s about rebuilding the entrance the expert bricked up.
There’s a lazy assumption that you can have depth or clarity but not both. Make it simple and you sacrifice accuracy. Keep it accurate and you lose the reader.
That’s rubbish and the best technical writers prove it every day. A good explanation of a complicated idea isn’t a watered-down version. It’s a better-organised version. The rigour is still there. It’s just been made into something a reasonably intelligent human can get their heads around.
Think of the difference between a research paper and a popular-science book covering the same finding. The book isn’t less true. It’s more considerate. It decides what you need to know first, what can wait and what can be left out entirely without lying to you.
That last part matters. Leaving things out isn’t the same as getting them wrong. Every good explanation is a series of honest omissions.
The B2B buyers you’re writing for know the difference too. In the 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 65% of hidden decision-makers said they prefer a more human, less formal tone over an intellectual one. And 57% favoured quick takeaways over deep, academic-style content (Edelman).
That isn’t a request to be shallow. Those same buyers said the hallmark of quality is thinking that helps them see a problem they hadn’t noticed. They want the depth. They just don’t want to work harder than they have to for it. As we all know, they’re busy.
There’s a narrow path between two kinds of disrespect in technical content.
The first is talking down. Over-explaining, defining terms your reader has known for a decade, wrapping everything in reassurance. It’s patronising and they can feel it. Oddly enough, they don’t like it.
The second is showing off. Using ten technical terms where three would do, keeping the difficulty in as a sort of gatekeeping, signalling that you belong to the club and they might not. This one often hides as rigour. It isn’t rigour. It’s insecurity.
The reader you want to write for is smart but uninformed on this specific thing. That’s a completely reasonable state to be in. A CFO evaluating a data-infrastructure vendor is clever. She’s just not a data engineer. And she shouldn’t have to become one to make a good decision.
Treat her accordingly. Assume intelligence, don’t assume knowledge. Explain the thing without explaining her to herself.
Here’s an approach that works when the subject in question is genuinely hard.
Start with the question, not the answer. Technical experts want to explain how something works. Readers want to know why it matters to them. Open with the problem the reader already feels, then earn the right to go deeper. Nobody cares how your compression algorithm works until they know it’s why their costs halved.
Find the one idea. Most technical pieces try to carry way too much. Pick the single insight that’s worth the reader’s time and build everything around it. A piece that makes one difficult idea click is worth ten that gesture at everything and land nothing. The best popular science books do just this.
Shift between big-picture and specific. Move up to the plain-language 30,000ft version, then down to the specific mechanism, then back up to what it means. Good technical writing goes up and down this ladder constantly. Stay too high and it’s vague. Stay too low and it’s unreadable.
Borrow something familiar. Analogy is the single most powerful tool for explaining the unfamiliar. It lets you connect new information to something the reader already gets. The trick is choosing an analogy that holds up under pressure and flagging where it breaks. A leaky analogy does more damage than none.
Define by using terminology. You don’t need a glossary box. Introduce a term in a sentence that makes its meaning obvious from context, then keep moving. The reader learns the word the way they learned most words, by seeing it do a job.
Cut the throat-clearing. Technical writing is full of preamble: background, scope, caveats, definitions, all before the point arrives. Move the point up. You can add nuance afterwards, once the reader knows why they’re reading.
None of this dilutes the material. The facts don’t change. The order does.
This is the part that trips up a lot of businesses. They have the expertise in-house. Genuinely world-class expertise, sitting in the heads of engineers, analysts, founders and specialists. So they assume the content should come directly from those people. Unfiltered.
Sometimes it can. Often it can’t, and for good reasons.
The first reason is the curse of knowledge I already mentioned. The person who knows the most is frequently the person least able to explain it to an outsider because they’ve lost sight of the outsider’s view. Depth of knowledge and clarity of explanation are different skills. They occasionally live in the same person. Usually they don’t.
The second reason is time. Your best technical people are your busiest technical people. They’re shipping product, closing deals, solving problems that only they can solve. Asking them to also become prolific writers is asking them to do a second job badly in hours they don’t have. Most attempts die here. The expert means to write the piece. The piece never gets written.
The third reason is that writing well is a craft in its own right. We wouldn’t ask a brilliant engineer to also design the brand or audit the accounts. At least I hope not. Turning expertise into clear, structured, persuasive content is a specialism too. It looks easy from the outside, which is exactly why it’s done badly so often .
This is where a good agency or writer earns their fee. Not by knowing more than your expert, which they never will, but by knowing how to extract what’s in the expert’s head and rebuild it for a reader who isn’t in the room. And yes, of course I’m biased in this.
The process usually looks like this. A skilled interviewer sits with the expert for an hour and asks the naive questions nobody internally dares ask. Those naive questions are the whole point. They bring out the assumptions the expert has stopped noticing. Then the writer does the translation, the structure and the shaping, and comes back with a draft the expert would never have had the time or the distance to produce.
The expert checks for accuracy. The writer owns the clarity. Between them you get something neither could have made alone.
That division of labour is the model. The expert supplies the truth. The writer supplies the translation. The reader gets both.
The stakes here are higher than they used to be because thought leadership has become a core part of how B2B buyers vet vendors.
In the Edelman and LinkedIn research, 64% of hidden decision-makers said they trust a company’s thought leadership more than its marketing materials and product sheets when assessing its capabilities. And 73% said an organisation’s thought leadership is one of the best ways to judge the calibre of thinking it will bring to clients (Edelman). During an RFP, 79% said they’re more likely to advocate for a supplier that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership over one that doesn’t.
The upshot of all this is that your content isn’t sitting alongside the sale. On technical subjects, it often is the sale (or at least the thing that gets you into the room). When a buyer can’t yet judge your product, they judge your thinking instead. Clear thinking reads as competence. Muddled thinking reads as risk.
Which means the payoff for getting technical content right isn’t ego. It’s pipeline. A piece that makes a hard idea genuinely click does three things at once. It builds trust. It proves competence. And it gives the person championing you internally something they can forward to a sceptical colleague without having to translate it themselves.
That last point is underrated. More than 40% of B2B deals stall because the buying group can’t get aligned internally (Edelman). A brilliantly clear explainer is a tool your champion uses to win an argument when you’re not there. Write it so they can forward it without a covering note.
So how should you approach technical content?
Make it accessible, not shallow. Respect the reader’s intelligence without assuming their knowledge. Focus on one idea, lay it out honestly and cut the throat-clearing. And accept that the person who knows the most often can’t be the person who writes it, not because they’re not clever enough, but because they’re too close and too busy (and actually, maybe too clever).
Hard subjects are worth the effort. The companies that can explain difficult things simply have an advantage that’s very hard to copy because most of their competitors will keep choosing the ditch.
It means reorganising complex information so a non-specialist can follow it. And to do so without removing the substance or misrepresenting the facts. Dumbing down strips out accuracy to make something easier. Making content accessible keeps the accuracy but improves the structure, uses plain language for jargon and leads with why the idea matters before explaining how it works. The rigour stays. Only the delivery changes.
Three reasons. First, the curse of knowledge: once you understand something deeply you forget what it’s like not to, so you skip steps and assume context a reader lacks. Second, time: the most knowledgeable people are usually the busiest, and writing rarely survives contact with their actual workload. Third, writing clearly is a separate craft from technical expertise, and the two skills seldom sit in the same person.
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias where, once you know something well, you can’t easily imagine not knowing it. It makes experts overestimate how much their audience already understands, leading them to use unexplained jargon, skip foundational steps and assume shared context. It’s the single biggest reason technical content becomes hard to follow.
The writer’s job isn’t to supply expertise. It’s to extract and translate it. A skilled interviewer asks the naive questions that surface an expert’s hidden assumptions, then handles the structuring and shaping that turn raw knowledge into a clear piece for an outside reader. The expert supplies and verifies the truth. The writer supplies the clarity. Neither could produce the result alone.
Yes. According to the 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 64% of hidden decision-makers trust a vendor’s thought leadership more than its marketing materials when assessing capability, and 79% are more likely to advocate for a supplier that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership during an RFP. On technical subjects, where buyers often can’t yet judge the product directly, the quality of your thinking becomes a proxy for the quality of your work.
Assume intelligence but not knowledge. Open with the problem the reader already feels rather than the mechanism you want to explain. Pick one core idea and build around it. Use analogies that connect new information onto something familiar, and flag where those analogies break down. Define terms by using them in context rather than stopping for a glossary. And move the main point up so the reader knows why they’re reading before you add nuance.
Both, in the right way. Buyers want depth of insight but not friction. The Edelman and LinkedIn research found 57% of decision-makers favour quick takeaways over dense academic content, while also valuing thinking that reveals problems they hadn’t spotted. The answer is to make the substance deep and the reading experience easy. Length isn’t the enemy. Effort is.
Jason Ball is the founder and managing director at Considered. With a multi-decade career in B2B marketing, he’s worked with world-leading brands such as Adobe, Google, EY and Cisco together with niche specialists in technology, manufacturing and professional services.