Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 3/Writing for the world

Third broad principle: writing for the world. Writing for the entire world. We are writing for a general reader, as I mentioned. We don't assume their nationality, their religion, their culture. We don't assume anything except that they can read. And by the way, there are even some initiatives of Spoken Wikipedia, recording Wikipedia, transmitting it over the radio, so that it can reach even people who cannot read.

But anyway, we generally assume our readers can read, and they have more or less the equivalent of a high school education, and no particular context or expertise. This means we need to *contextualize*, sometimes more than you might naturally tend to. If you're used to speaking to people from your own culture, your own country, your own town, you may take certain things for granted that you shouldn't.

Imagine that you are writing for a person who can read English, but who lives in Iceland or Brazil or Mongolia, and they know nothing about your country's culture, but they're interested, they're reading an article. Maybe you're writing for a person who is not with a Christian background, or from a non-monotheistic background. Maybe you're writing for a Hindu reader. So things that are very familiar to everyone who grew up in a culture based on the Bible aren't as natural for them. We shouldn't take these things for granted.

How do we contextualize? We add little pieces of framing. For example, "according to the Christian gospels, so and so happened". Instead of asserting with Wikipedia's factual voice that something happened or didn't happen, or if we are describing, say, some spirit or demon or something in Hausa folklore, we should say that! "In Hausa folklore, it is believed that..." Or "In Hausa culture, traditionally it is the case that..." I don't know anything about Hausa folklore. For a reader like me, it would be extremely important to contextualize and say "what we're about to tell you, it's not that it is the case, it's not that it is definitely factually true; it is a piece of folklore from a particular culture".

Likewise, we shouldn't assume our reader to share our frame of geography or time! So we shouldn't say things like "here", "in this country", "last year", or "soon", because you don't know when or where your readers will be reading this, right? It may be "last year" when you're writing it, but three years from now, it will no longer be last year. These expressions may be very natural for us as we write, but we have to train ourselves not to use them, and instead to use fixed, concrete references: "in 2005", "in Ghana". That's true, wherever I am, wherever I'm reading from.