Exformation
Fascinating little article on "Exformation" as opposed to "information": deliberately discarding information that you know your reader already has.
I think an example of a print author who does this quite well might be Stephen King, Mr. 'Big Mac and Fries' Novelist himself. He teaches you the shorthand in his particular book, his particular character(s), and then uses it. By the time you get to the end of the novel Misery, you understand exactly why Paul Sheldon shrieks "Africa!" at the top of his lungs.
The article asks, however, what kind of assumptions can writers for the web make? In a global medium, basically, who is going to understand your American-pop-culture joke? Yet, explaining too much can be as bad as too litle.
Interesting.
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