@neauoire Yeah this is one of the first things I learned when writing technical things. People write these things thinking it makes it more approachable (don’t worry, you’ll have an easy time) but all it does is alienate anyone for whom it is not easy. I actually wrote a quick plugin for my text editor that highlighted any instance of “simple”, “easy”, “trivial”, “straightforward”, and about a dozen other similar words. Deleting them always made my writing better and more approachable.

@neauoire when I first started doing technical writing in my work, @robpike taught me never to describe things as “simple” or “obvious” or to say “just do x”, all of which imply a facility in the reader that may not exist. It stuck with me.

@neauoire but what if I hate my students?