As fiction writers know, we see the world differently. I find this article particularly useful to writers of every
ilk - novel authors, essayists, business writers, and freelancers. Great info for editors also. It is reprinted with the permission of the University of Florida.
6
scientific tips to improve your writing
A new book uses insights into the reading brain to
give writers clear-cut, science-based guidelines on how to write anything well,
from an email to a multi-million-dollar proposal.
Yellowlees Douglas, an associate professor of management
communication at the University of Florida, wrote the book to satisfy her
frustrated students’ needs for a guide to writing that “didn’t just tell my
students to imitate Hemingway, as one of them put it,” Douglas says.
“Here I was, teaching quantitative thinkers in the
colleges of business and medicine, and every book I assigned had my students
ready to tear their hair out.”
So Douglas wrote The
Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer (Cambridge University Press, 2015), drawing off the data
that had first snagged her interest decades earlier while investigating the
impacts of multimedia documents on reading.
The book uses data from eye-tracking, EEG brain scans,
and fMRI neuroimaging, some of which give scientific backing to the usefulness
of old standbys like thesis sentences and active voice. However, the book also
dispels many well-worn myths, like avoiding beginning sentences with “and.”
The Reader’s Brain also provides insight into where to put information you
want readers to remember—and where to stash disclosures you’d rather they
forget. Even the cadence of your sentences, the book argues, subconsciously
cues your readers to your skill as a writer.
“People who work with data think systematically,” Douglas
says, “and, if you tell them to do something, they automatically want to know,
‘Where’s the data?’ Having published in the sciences, I know exactly how they
feel.”
Six tips for better writing
1. Prime your readers
“Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them,
then tell them what you’ve told them.” Few of us realize this advice has its
roots in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In recent decades, researchers
have discovered that priming is a form of implicit learning. By merely exposing
experimental subjects to lists of random words, researchers discovered the
earlier exposure triggered accurate recall a day later—even though the subjects
were unaware they would be tested later on the list.
When you tell readers your purpose in the first sentences
of a memo, email, or proposal, you bolster their ease of comprehension and
increase their recall of content later.
2. Use ‘recency’ to your advantage
The last item in the “Tell them” triad refers to what
psychologists call recency effects, which influence our ability to remember the
last items we read. Recency effects extend to both short-term and long-term
memory. Readers remember final sentences in paragraphs, items in lists, and
paragraphs in documents more clearly than anything else they read.
Carefully compose that call-to-action paragraph in a proposal
and concluding paragraph in your next report. And that final sentence in every
opening paragraph in your emails? Dedicate that sentence to whatever action you
need your readers to take—and when they should do it.
3. Disappoint without destroying good will
You can benefit from the strength of priming and recency
effects when you have to tell a client you’re unable to meet a deadline or
inform an employee she’s not getting the position she applied for. How? Priming
and recency effects create a “dead zone” in the middles of lists, sentences,
paragraphs, and entire documents.
4. Bury bad news
You can prime the reader with a neutral opening
paragraph, one with content that’s neither misleadingly encouraging or
straight-to-the-point bad news. Clinical studies attest to the impact of
negative news in a first paragraph creating resistance and hostility to the
rest of the message.
Open your second paragraph with a rationale for the
unwelcome part of your message—the cause for the effect you’re going to
explore. Then embed the most lethal content in a minor clause in the dead
center of the paragraph. Close that paragraph with a neutral sentence,
mentioning whatever benefits you can conjure to offer your reader.
Then craft a short, positive paragraph as your closing
that’s forward-looking, maintaining your readers’ goodwill by using the
document’s recency position. Your reader will get the message without getting
hostile toward you.
5. Harness cause and effect
From an evolutionary perspective, our tendency to see
cause and effect everywhere is essential to our survival. When you place the
rationale for a negative decision before you tell your reader the decision
itself, you leverage the power of causation.
In studies dating back to the 1940s, participants
invariably described footage of simple, animated squares and triangles in terms
of cause and effect. Your reader is also highly susceptible to seeing
causation. When you turn sentences into micro-narratives of cause and effect,
you make your writing easier to read and recall.
6. Don’t let passive voice drag you down
You’ve probably already heard about the evils of passive
construction: placing an outcome at the beginning of your sentence, in the
grammatical subject, using a non-action verb, and generally burying the actor
responsible. But English is a subject-verb-object language, and readers also
expect language to obey what linguists call the iconicity assumption.
In other words, we expect the order of items in a
sentence to reflect the order in which they occurred in the world. When you use
passive construction, readers’ brains show more activity—and reading speed
slows down, no matter how simple your content.
Love to hear what you think.........
Write like you mean it!
Mahala
