Writing About Something You Half Understand

How it happens

Rarely through dishonesty. Through momentum.

A topic list says write about a subject adjacent to your work. You know something about it, not everything. You read for a morning, the gaps fill in plausibly, and by the afternoon the draft reads confidently throughout.

The confident parts and the researched parts are indistinguishable on the page, including to you.

That is the failure: not that you wrote about something unfamiliar, but that nothing in the piece marks which half is which.

Who notices

Not the general reader, which is why this persists.

The people who notice are the ones who know the subject, and for a business those are frequently the most valuable readers: the informed buyer, the specifier, the person who will recommend you to somebody else.

They spot it immediately, because expertise is easiest to detect at its edges. A piece that is right in general and wrong in one specific is more damaging than one that is vague throughout.

And the reaction is not that you made an error. It is a quiet downgrade of everything else you have published.

The threshold

Not that you must be an authority, which would leave most businesses with nothing to write.

The threshold is that you can distinguish what you know from what you have read, and you say which is which.

Have you done this, seen it done, or read about it. All three are legitimate material. Presenting the third as the first is the problem.

A page saying we have installed forty of these and here is what we have found is credible at any level of expertise. A page saying industry best practice suggests, assembled from three articles that morning, is not, regardless of accuracy.

Write from what you have done

• What you have actually built, fixed, or run.
• Mistakes you made and what they cost.
• Patterns across many jobs that nobody doing one would see.
• What customers get wrong, repeatedly.
• Where the standard advice did not hold for you.

None requires you to be the leading authority. All of it is unavailable to somebody researching for a morning, which is precisely what makes it worth publishing.

Marking the edge

The practical technique, and it costs one sentence.

Say plainly where your knowledge stops. We have not worked on systems above this size, so what follows applies to smaller installations. Or: this is our experience across about thirty jobs, which is not the same as a controlled study.

Writers avoid this believing it undermines authority. It does the opposite, because a stated limit implies everything outside it was considered, and an unlimited claim implies nothing was.

A reader who knows the subject reads the limitation as competence. A reader who does not is unaffected.

A worked example

A ventilation contractor wrote a piece about indoor air quality that drifted into health effects, citing figures found that morning.

An architect who had been considering them for a project pointed out that two of the figures were from a different context and did not apply.

Nothing else in the piece was wrong, and the contractor's actual expertise, which was substantial, was no longer what the exchange was about.

The rewrite dropped the health claims and covered what they had measured themselves: readings before and after installation across a number of buildings, with a note that they measured airflow rather than health outcomes and that the latter was outside their field.

It was a narrower piece and a better one.

The architect referenced the revised version when they eventually appointed them, saying it was the only supplier document that had been clear about what it did not cover.

Research is fine, and belongs elsewhere

Reading before writing is not the problem. Presenting it as your own experience is.

Where you draw on someone else's work, say so and point to it. That is normal practice and it costs nothing, since a reader who wanted the source would have looked for it anyway.

Attribution also protects you. A figure you cited and attributed, which turns out to be disputed, is a sourcing question. The same figure asserted as your own knowledge is a competence question.

And a piece that clearly separates what you did from what you read is more useful, because the reader can weigh the two differently.

The topics to leave alone

Some subjects should not be written about at partial knowledge regardless of framing.

Anything where acting on wrong information causes physical harm: structural, electrical, gas, chemical handling, or anything load-bearing in the literal sense.

Anything legal, medical, or financial where a general statement gets applied to a specific situation.

And anything regulatory, where requirements vary by jurisdiction and being approximately right is functionally being wrong.

The reasonable approach in those areas is to describe what you do, refer to the relevant authority, and say plainly that specifics require a qualified opinion.

Half-understood is not the same as uncertain

A distinction worth drawing, because the advice here is easily overapplied.

Writing about something genuinely uncertain, where the honest answer is that it depends or that opinion is divided, is valuable and quite different from writing beyond your knowledge.

Saying we have seen this go both ways and here is what seems to determine which is a useful contribution.

The failure is not admitting uncertainty. It is manufacturing certainty about something you have not encountered.

The counter-case

Waiting for complete knowledge is its own failure and a common one.

Specialists routinely publish nothing because they are conscious of everything they do not know, while less careful competitors publish freely and are read.

The standard is not certainty, it is honest labelling. A piece that says here is what we have found, across this many cases, with these limits, is publishable by anybody who has done the work.

If you have installed the thing, run the process, or handled the problem forty times, you know more than almost everyone reading, and the caution that stops you writing is usually miscalibrated.

Before publishing

1. Mark each claim as done, seen, or read.
2. Cut or attribute everything in the third category.
3. State where your knowledge ends, in one sentence.
4. Remove figures you cannot source.
5. Check for harm-capable subjects and refer those out.
6. Narrow the scope until every claim is one you own.

Step six usually produces a shorter piece and always a stronger one.

Capturing what you know before it is lost is covered in what you learned that should be written down.

Frequently asked questions

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