{"id":38,"date":"2026-07-13T14:29:01","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T14:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/?p=38"},"modified":"2026-07-25T22:00:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T22:00:18","slug":"your-audience-shouldnt-need-a-translator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/your-audience-shouldnt-need-a-translator\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Audience Shouldn’t Need a Translator"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Working in communications ruins presentations for you. You stop watching the slides and start watching the room instead. Who’s nodding, who’s lost, who’s given up and started reading three paragraphs of text while the presenter is talking about something else entirely. Do this long enough and you start noticing the same pattern over and over again: the people who know a subject best are usually the worst people to explain it. Not because they’re not smart. Because they’re experts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They’ve been living inside the topic for months, sometimes years. Acronyms become ordinary words. Technical details become obvious. Context disappears because they’ve stopped remembering what it feels like not to know. I do it too. Ask me about film photography and I’ll happily spend ten minutes talking about ISO, latitude, reciprocity failure, and why a forty-year-old Minolta makes me happier than most modern cameras. Somewhere around minute three, I’ve completely forgotten that you probably just wanted to know which camera to buy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s what expertise does. It compresses years of learning into something that feels obvious. Communication is the opposite job. It’s unpacking that expertise until someone else can carry it too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When someone hands me a presentation to redesign, I don’t start by opening PowerPoint. I read it. Not as the person who wrote it, but as the person who’s about to receive it. If this were my first day on the job, would I understand it? If I worked in another department, where would I get lost? If I weren’t an expert, what context would I need before any of this started making sense? Those questions usually solve more problems than any font, color palette, or animation ever will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the requests I’ve heard most often throughout my career is, “Can you make it prettier?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I don’t think that’s the right question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pretty is subjective. What I think is beautiful, someone else might hate. What actually matters is whether it works for the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some weeks the best thing I do is delete half the words from a slide. Other weeks it’s breaking one overloaded slide into four simpler ones. Sometimes it’s taking a statistic the presenter desperately wants to include and moving it to the appendix because, while it’s accurate, it isn’t helping anyone understand the story. The goal isn’t to say less. The goal is to say exactly what the audience needs, exactly when they need it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the best executive presentations I’ve ever worked on barely had any text at all. Outside the opening and closing slides, the story lived almost entirely in the script. The visuals and animations appeared exactly when they were needed, supporting the narrative instead of competing with it. It reminded me of a children’s book, and I mean that as high praise. Children’s books understand something a surprising number of executive presentations don’t: introduce one idea, let it land, then build on it. Nobody’s trying to impress the reader with how much they know. They’re trying to make sure the reader understands before turning the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s really the job, when I think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not making things prettier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working in communications ruins presentations for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You stop watching the slides and start watching the room instead. Who’s nodding, who’s lost, who’s given up and started reading three paragraphs of text while the presenter is talking about something else entirely. Do this long enough and the same pattern keeps showing up: the people who know a subject best are usually the worst people to explain it. Not because they’re not smart. Because they’re experts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They’ve been living inside the topic for months, sometimes years. Acronyms become ordinary words. Technical details become obvious. Context disappears because they’ve stopped remembering what it feels like not to know. I do it too. Ask me about film photography and I’ll happily spend ten minutes talking about ISO, latitude, reciprocity failure, and why a forty-year-old Minolta makes me happier than most modern cameras. Somewhere around minute three, I’ve forgotten that you probably just wanted to know which camera to buy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s what expertise does. It compresses years of learning into something that feels obvious. Communication is the opposite job. It’s unpacking that expertise until someone else can carry it too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When someone hands me a presentation to redesign, I don’t start by opening PowerPoint. I read it first. Not as the person who wrote it. As the person about to receive it. If this were my first day on the job, would I understand it? If I worked in another department, where would I get lost? If I weren’t an expert, what context would I need before any of this started making sense? Those questions usually solve more problems than any font, color palette, or animation ever will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the requests I’ve heard most often throughout my career is, “Can you make it prettier?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I don’t think that’s the right question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pretty is subjective. What I think is beautiful, someone else might hate. What actually matters is whether it works for the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some weeks the best thing I do is delete half the words from a slide. Other weeks it’s breaking one overloaded slide into four simpler ones. Sometimes it’s taking a statistic the presenter desperately wants to include and moving it to the appendix because, while it’s accurate, it isn’t helping anyone understand the story. The goal isn’t to say less. The goal is to say exactly what the audience needs, exactly when they need it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the best executive presentations I’ve ever worked on barely had any text at all. Outside the opening and closing slides, the story lived almost entirely in the script. The visuals and animations appeared exactly when they were needed, supporting the narrative instead of competing with it. It reminded me of a children’s book, and I mean that as high praise. Children’s books understand something a surprising number of executive presentations don’t: introduce one idea, let it land, then build on it. Nobody’s trying to impress the reader with how much they know. They’re trying to make sure the reader understands before turning the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s really the job, when I think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not making things prettier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not proving how much the presenter knows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making experts understandable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because if your audience still needs a translator after you’ve finished presenting, you haven’t really communicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Let’s Talk<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Whether you’re presenting to executives, frontline employees, customers, or a room full of people who have never heard of your project before, the challenge is always the same: helping them understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’ve got a presentation that feels too dense, too technical, or just isn’t landing the way it should, I’d love to help you turn expertise into understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Working in communications ruins presentations for you. You stop watching the slides and start watching the room instead. Who’s nodding, who’s lost, who’s given up and started reading three paragraphs of text while the presenter is talking about something else entirely. Do this long enough and you start noticing the same pattern over and over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_narrativo_title_es":"Tu p\u00fablico no deber\u00eda necesitar un traductor","_narrativo_excerpt_es":"Explicar una idea no deber\u00eda ser m\u00e1s dif\u00edcil que tenerla. Si tu presentaci\u00f3n se siente demasiado t\u00e9cnica, demasiado densa o simplemente no est\u00e1 conectando con la audiencia, conversemos\u2026","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126,"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/126"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativo.studio\/thinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}