A key to effective communication

I read Rudolf Flesch’s book “How to Write Plain English” a few years ago. A core message was to make sentences short. And simple. Use everyday words, not Daedalian words. Aligning Flesch’s thinking with Claude Shannon’s information theory, I think a key concept is this: Use words, schematics, plots, tables, pictures … that the reader is FAMILIAR with. If you write someone a very new type of message, with new types of data, presented in new types of plots, just know at the start that it’s going to take the reader a long time (or many iterations) to understand the message. And sometimes that’s OK too.