Of course.Those can be dangerous words—and not because of any possible entendre. No, what makes of course dangerous is its implications. And its implications are found in many places that it isn't.
Surely by now you know what I'm getting at.
Of course, you're catching on to what I'm saying here.
Needless to say (then why am I saying it?), you've got the point.
But what if you don't?
I've just finished a fascinating, engaging book called "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," by Leonard Susskind. He is a renowned and accomplished physicist and, like Carl Sagan, a terrific science writer. He's able to distill incredibly complex ideas—which, really, can be accurately described only by advanced mathematics—to basic, understandable (if imperfect) analogies. I wouldn't be able to understand anything about Quantum Mechanics or String Theory otherwise.
But in "The Black Hole War," Susskind makes a writer's classic mistake: the assumption. Maybe I shouldn't have made "The Black Hole War" bedtime reading, but one night recently, I was reading an in-depth analogy about String Theory, Quantum Field Theory and black hole horizons, when suddenly: "By now you have probably made the connection with Black Hole Complementarity" (page 359 in the Little, Brown and Co. hardcover). I had? To be fair, I was with Susskind all the way, but I was most certainly not jumping ahead of him. As I was trying to wrap my mind around a description of quantum “jitters,” Susskind was assuming I’d connected his analogy to Black Hole Complementarity. I hadn’t. That's Susskind's fault—for assuming that the lay reader was keeping up with the brilliant physicist.
I'm still not entirely sure how the concepts are connected, but that's my fault. I should be reading this book in a quiet library after a triple espresso—not in bed after midnight with a purring cat on my lap.
Of course not.
So keep your reader in mind as you write, and make sure you're bringing him along with you. It's not like orally telling a story—when you see the listener's face and reactions and can gauge whether he’s following you.
But you don't want to bore readers with repetition either. It’s a fine line.
In Susskind's case, he was using the assumption as a way to move his narrative along, to signal that his analogy was connected to Black Hole Complementarity. But what he ended up doing was confusing this reader. And hurting his self esteem a little too: I was supposed to have figured out how these concepts were connected? Man, I'm not as smart as I thought I was.
