Here is Gerald Graff* discussing why leftist academics have trouble getting people to listen to them; I think it’s good advice for anyone:
… It is not their jargon that makes politically vanguard academics unpublishable in Newsweek so much as their tendency to assume an addressee who already takes their assumptions for granted, or at least does not need to have them spelled out. … What turns away lay audiences, I think, is the failure to take their assumptions into account … [emphasis added]
That’s teaching economics in a nutshell: students walk in with a ton of assumptions, and the professor has a much smaller, and very different, handful of assumptions.
* From the piece “Preaching to the Converted” in English inside and out: the places of literary criticism by Susan Gubar and Jonathan Kamholtz. You can find this in Google Books, although I ran across it while looking for the previous essay in the volume.
Comments