Teaching at scale, writing for one student

The health and medicine material I made as a teaching fellow has been watched more times than I can meaningfully picture. The number is a bad guide to the craft. Everything that made those lessons work came from imagining a single person, mildly stuck, slightly embarrassed to be stuck, and short on time.

Scale rewards clarity and punishes cleverness. An explanation that flatters the explainer fails at volume; an explanation that respects the confusion travels. The best editing question I know is still: what does this sentence assume the listener already believes?

Write for one confused person and a million will follow.

This is also why I keep writing: explaining an idea reveals where my own understanding is incomplete. The aim is to leave the reader with something they can use.