We have taught writing for public health to students completing a Master of Public Health since 2016 in Japan. We adopted a writing-to-learn approach and assigned work to students to write health materials that encourage recipients to perform health behaviors (eg, drafting a poster to encourage lay audiences to adopt preventive behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic). We collected students’ work assignments and products from 2016 to 2020 and reviewed them to identify distinctive trends common to all years. We found that there was a curse of knowledge (ie, difficulties to imagine the state of mind of not knowing when knowing something) among students. Students strongly embraced the adage “knowledge is power” and underestimated the difficulties lay audiences face. Their writing was somewhat dogmatic, whereby experts imparted privileged knowledge to ignorant non-experts. However, it is well known that merely imparting knowledge often does not work to educate lay audiences about making better decisions. Debiasing this curse of knowledge among students will be the main target of our writing education.

自 2016 年以来，我们一直在日本向完成公共卫生硕士学位的学生教授公共卫生写作。我们采用了“边写边学”的方法，并分配学生撰写健康材料，鼓励接受者采取健康行为（例如，起草海报以鼓励非专业观众在 COVID-19 大流行期间采取预防行为）。我们收集了 2016 年至 2020 年学生的作业和产品，并对它们进行了审查，以确定所有年份共同的独特趋势。我们发现，学生中存在一种知识诅咒（即很难想象知道某事却不知的心态）。学生们强烈拥护“知识就是力量”这句格言，却低估了观众面临的困难。他们的著作有些教条，专家将特权知识传授给无知的非专家。然而，众所周知，仅仅传授知识通常并不能教育非专业受众做出更好的决策。消除学生中这种知识诅咒将是我们写作教育的主要目标。