I was reading this article about very gifted children

[conuly]

It's an interesting enough article, but what I'm posting about is this line:

At the age of 12, Ophelia clocked 162 in Mensa’s IQ test. It is the highest possible score for someone under 18, and on a level with Stephen Hawking, the ground-breaking cosmologist who died last year.

It's a bit of a weird thing to say, when you think about it. Does anybody seriously imagine that people reading this article have never heard of Stephen Hawking and need to be told who he is?

Good form in writing in English, as my teachers drilled into my head as a child, means assuming your readers have lived their entire lives under a rock and, consequently, know nothing. The quoted text reminded me of this post by LanguageLog that reiterates that, using the example of an article from the WSJ which takes the time to patiently reminded its readers that McDonald's is a fast food company.

It's not strange until you really think about it, and then you can't stop seeing it.

Comments

[silveradept]

At which point xkcd #1053, aka "The Lucky 10,000" is the result when someone encounters a thing they haven't heard about before. For someone doing the writing, that's a lot of people who might be first learning about a thing through the work.

[mount_oregano]

It wasn't writing, but I showed my husband sun dogs for the first time this evening. And he's 57. Never heard of 'em.