In 2005, I saw the legendary Dry Branch Fire Squad bluegrass band perform in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rob Thomason, the band’s front-man and mandolin player, is famous for his winding monologues that feel more like a Mark Twain performance than a typical bluegrass set. His stories that night at the Prism often lasted longer than the songs themselves. Several times, he used this line, “I had to tell you that to tell you this…”, as the perfect hook to pull the audience back after a long, hilarious detour.
I am working on a few posts about topics I think are currently interesting in software development. I shared one of them with a friend to get feedback on what I had written. His response made me realize that the post contained more background material than the discussion I was trying to have. I immediately thought of Thomason: “I had to tell you that to tell you this…”
The basic problem here is that a blog post is open to everyone on the internet to read, but everyone on the internet is far too broad an audience for any post I write. (Or indeed any post anyone writes.)
What’s more, for any given post I write, there is an implicit audience. You as reader have no way of knowing who I have in mind. Maybe I am thinking of “the whole internet,” but that certainly isn’t the case for most posts. So what if I just made my intended audience explicit?
My current best solution for handling this is an assumed audience heading on the top of a post. Think of it as a sign-post for people to understand who I was thinking of while writing. A few examples:
- Assumed Audience: parents of teenagers
- Assumed Audience: people curious about Earth history
- Assumed Audience: people who enjoy nature and travel
- Assumed Audience: other experienced software engineers
Each of those are people I might actually address on this blog - and there are plenty of others, of course. What’s potentially useful about this kind of thing is that good-faith readers know how to approach the content.
Thomason used his signature line to earn his digressions. Perhaps a small two-line header at the top of a post can do the same work for me.