Write for the reader: modern guidelines
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This document provides guidance on writing for readability and neurocognitive ease. It discusses three key stages of the reading process - lexical, syntactic, and inference building. To aid comprehension, assimilation and recall, writers should use familiar words, clear subject-verb-object sentence structures, chronological order, and continuity between ideas. Focusing on speed, efficiency and accuracy of recall, the document recommends techniques like priming content, hierarchy of information, and placing positives before negatives. The overall goal is to make written content feel easy to understand and mentally effortless for readers.
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Write for the reader: modern guidelines
- 1. Write for the reading brain Cheryl Stephens email@cherylstephens.com October 2019
- 2. Make it feel easy to understand. Achieve neurocognitve reading ease with these practices.
- 4. We must measure readability by outcomes Speed of reading Cortical efficiency Accuracy of recall
- 5. Reading Process: Understanding requires reader Comprehend language Assimilate content Recall content
- 6. 3 stages of reading process Lexical: words Syntactic: sentence structure Inference: narrative
- 7. Lexical: know the words Reader recognizes word assigns meaning based on familiarity with the word from past encounters
- 8. Choosing words Chose familiar, commonly-used words. Chose concrete words, not abstractions. An abstraction or concept can be the subject of the sentence but must not express the main action. Don’t vary your words for the same meaning.
- 9. Syntactic: sentence structure Word meanings are more easily assigned based on function and position in sentence Surrounding words are used to understand construction of sentence Resders have expectations • main noun appears before main verb • both appear early in sentence • subject-verb-object (default structure in English)
- 10. Protect the sentence core Subject and verb near start of sentence. Theory or concept can be the agent of action. Main agent takes main action: • Make the main agent the subject. • Make the main verb express the agent’s action. Modifiers follow the verb.
- 11. Sentence core Someone does something. The story unfolds. Theory or concept can be the agent of action. Main agent takes main action: • Make the main agent the subject. • Make the predicate express the agent’s action. Abstract concepts become concrete in a story.
- 12. To comprehend, assimilate, and recall To actually comprehend, assimilate, and recall written language, readers use another stage: building inferences
- 13. Building accurate inferences Noun subject takes action Subject can be actor, abstraction, or theory Clear relationship between subject and verb Chronological, sequential order Clear causal connections, transitions, key words Scenario develops Time Space Action Cause Intention
- 14. Enhancing recall Priming-previewing Primacy- hierarchy/sequence Recency- important content last Continuity -create a thread
- 15. Continuity Use topic sentences. Repeat key words. Summarize at ends. Use obvious or familiar schema or organization. Put positive information first, negatives and limitations last or embedded.
- 16. How to achieve good outcomes Speed Efficiency Recall
- 17. Speed and efficiency achieved when Words are familiar Context and sentence structure limit possible meanings Reader expectations are met: Reader anticipates meaning and predicts narrative
- 18. Speed and efficiency lost when Reader must backtrack to re-read Passive voice verb Word meanings inconsistent with past encounters Embedded information between S-V-O structure within subject phrase Reader prediction fails: mental map is wrong
- 19. Speed, efficiency, and recall Reflects cortical activity needed to process content More effort with Sentence length Sentence complexity Deviation from S- V-O order
- 20. Fluency • How easy it feels to understand something • A heuristic to help us make fast and effortless judgements. • A mental shortcut we use to make positive judgments
- 21. Fluency
- 22. Fluent writing is believable
- 23. How to create readable writing? Understand reading process Assist fluency Make recall easier Write for outcomes
Editor's Notes
- Whenever we encounter new information, our brains immediately try to make sense of it. Once they figure out what we’re seeing in a physical sense, they work to provide personal context and decide if it’s relevant enough to focus on further. The process is instantaneous: we don’t even realize we’ve made a choice in the time our minds have selected one path or another. Our gaze either stops, or we simply keep scanning. Maria Kornikova
- Use lists when possible. “We are drawn to it intuitively, we process it more efficiently, and we retain it with little effort.” “It spatially organizes the information; and it promises a story that’s finite, whose length has been quantified upfront. Together, these create an easy reading experience, in which the mental heavy lifting of conceptualization, categorization, and analysis is completed well in advance of actual consumption… And there’s little that our brains crave more than effortlessly acquired data.” Mariak Kornikova
- Readers like lists. “The social psychologist Robert Zajonc, who made his name studying the connection between emotion and cognition, argued that the positive feeling of completion in and of itself is enough to inform future decisions. Preferences, goes his famous coinage, need no inferences” Maria Kornikova
- . Lists also appeal to our general tendency to categorize things—in fact, it’s hard for us not to categorize something the moment we see it—since they chunk information into short, distinct components. This type of organization facilitates both immediate understanding and later recall, as the neuroscientist Walter Kintsch pointed out back in 1968. Because we can process information more easily when it’s in a list than when it’s clustered and undifferentiated, like in standard paragraphs, a list feels more intuitive. In other words, lists simply feel better. Maria Kornikova