When the Words Change, Who Receives Them Changes

1. "Too Advanced"

I met with a government official. I had them scan a QR code and experience a voice coming back to life. They said, "The idea is really good." Then they added: "It's too advanced for right now."

I took that phrase home and wrote a brochure. The title was: "What seems too advanced today will become ordinary tomorrow."

I noticed the problem immediately. It was creating urgency. It was saying, "You're wrong to think this is too advanced" — negating their judgment from the outside. A government official reading it might feel vaguely blamed.

I changed the title: "The voice you preserve today becomes your town's memory a hundred years from now."

The content was the same, but the feeling was completely different. The first was an accusation: you're falling behind. The second was an invitation: what you do today connects to the future.

2. Starting a Fight with "But"

The brochure opened with: "Official records survive. But how someone lived doesn't."

I felt the problem immediately. A government official reading that might think: "They're dismissing everything we've built." If you start a conversation by invalidating the other person's work, the words that follow won't land.

I rewrote it: "An infrastructure for preserving voices, faces, and words across physical, national, and digital layers."

Instead of fighting official records, I stood beside them. That one shift changed the posture of everything that followed.

3. Speaking Someone Else's Language

In the support section, I wrote: "Research available subsidies and grants; prepare documentation for council explanations."

Then I realized: fire departments and city offices don't receive subsidies. They request budgets. The language of "subsidies" belongs to nonprofits and private organizations applying to government — not to the government itself.

What these officials actually face is budget requests, budget reviews, and council approval. "Let's look into subsidies" doesn't match their reality at all.

I rewrote it: "We'll build the cost-benefit materials together. Documents you can use in budget requests and council sessions."

One word change creates the feeling: this person understands us. One wrong word creates distance: this person is an outsider.

4. The Official's Inner Monologue

When rewriting the three-wall descriptions, I asked myself: "What is this person saying to themselves right now?"

My first draft on quantifying impact read: "Approval won't come from 'sounds useful.' You need numbers — years of preservation, access count, labor savings." That's an outside observation.

The words inside the official's head sound more like: "I can picture the use cases. I want to try this. But I need numbers to get it through approval. How do I even quantify the impact?"

The same is true for legal compliance. "Verifying alignment with privacy law, public records management law, and copyright law" is how a lawyer speaks. "There's no precedent, so just sorting out the legal questions takes forever" is how the official speaks. Same content — one is describing a problem, the other is worrying together.

5. Whose Concreteness Is It?

The use cases had the same problem. My first draft for Cultural Heritage read: "Preserve audio of stone monuments, buildings, and traditional arts across three layers. Elevated to national record via National Diet Library. Full reconstruction possible after physical degradation."

Technically accurate. But the official can't picture their own situation in it.

Rewritten: "Stone monument inscriptions, living cultural heritage performances, local folk art audio — all in a QR code. Paste a QR on an interpretive sign, and anyone standing before a weathered monument can receive its voice and image."

"Anyone standing before a weathered monument" triggers a mental image. The official thinks of a specific monument in their jurisdiction. Concreteness isn't something you bring — it's whether the other person's mind generates a picture.

6. The Loneliness of "No Precedent"

The origin of this brochure was a gravestone I encountered during international volunteer work — one that read only "Unknown." Someone whose name didn't survive. I wanted to create opportunities for everyone to preserve their existence, before and after death.

The loneliness an official feels when they say "there's no precedent" connects to that question. Someone has to go first — that's how precedent gets made. I put the line "you don't have to carry 'no precedent' alone" into the brochure for exactly that reason.

The gravestone of the unknown person and the official's "no precedent" share the same root. A quiet resistance to what went unrecorded.

7. Perspective Means Going Inside, Not Standing Outside

"Writing from the reader's perspective" is a common phrase. But in practice, it often stops at a change in position — observing from where they stand, while still standing outside them.

Real perspective goes one level deeper. What is this person saying in their head right now? What words do they use to understand their own situation? What makes them anxious? What gives them relief?

To find that, you have to enter their daily reality — the logic of their organization, the language they use, the solitude they feel. Only by going that deep can you reach the words that already live inside them. I only knew that this official needed "a first step that turns an interesting idea into something real" because I had the actual conversation and heard those words.

8. When the Words Change, Who Receives Them Changes

I changed the title. I changed the opening line. I changed the language in the bullet points. The content didn't change. But who receives it did.

"Too advanced" reaches people who feel confident about being advanced. "The voice you preserve today" reaches people ready to begin something today. The first stands in the way before the reader can move. The second pushes them forward.

Words are design. You design who receives them, what emotion they generate, what action they lead to. Neglect that design and even the best content won't reach the people it's meant for.