Writing often takes a lot of time and practice to master, but according to a new book by Yellowlees Douglas, an associate professor of management communication at the University of Florida, there are a few neuroscience-backed tips anyone can use to become a better wordsmith.
Douglas wrote the book after seeing her students become frustrated by previous writing guides, according to a report on Futurity.
“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,” she said, adding that the pupils wanted guides that “didn’t just tell my students to imitate Hemingway, as one of them put it.”
The solution: Douglas, remembering data that she had found interesting in the past, compiled it together in her own book, The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer. The studies she looked at included those that tracked eye motions, imaged the brain using fMRI, and scanned it using EEGs.
The book has many ideas for how to improve your writing, providing insights on what conventions to keep (and chuck out)—for example, starting a sentence with “and” is A-Okay, by Douglas’ research. It also shows readers how to lay out information so they can remember the important items.
Help them remember
Cause and effect are very important to the human mind. For example, studies dating back to the 1940s found that participants described even the simplest animations—animated triangles and squares—in terms of cause and effect. Humans relate to this structure, so if sentences can be turned into narratives of causes and effects, the ideas contained within them are easier to read and remember.
But memory can be augmented in others ways. One of the most important steps to take is the old English teacher standby: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them.
This wisdom actually relates to the psychology and neuroscience notion of priming. It’s well-established that even glancing at a list of random words can “prime” you to recall them later. Likewise, if you begin by presenting the purpose of whatever you’re writing, you bolster not only comprehension of the entire piece, but also help them to remember it later.
Meanwhile, telling them what you told them relates to the idea of recency, or the effect shown when items on a list come last. Items first on the list evoke the primacy effect; items that end the list evoke the recency effect; both show greatly improved recall.
Hide the bad stuff
If the first and last things you write are the things most remembered, you might want to hide uncomfortable information somewhere other than those two places. For example, telling someone they did not get a position they applied for should be buried in the middle of a paragraph or letter, so as to soften the blow.
This is backed by clinical studies, which have shown that when readers receive bad news in the first paragraph of a writing, they tend to react with hostility and resistance to the rest of the message. So, if delivering bad news, a neutral opening paragraph is a better idea.
Get active
That one English teacher who yelled at your for using the passive voice was unfortunately right. (Not that we’ll admit it to them.) If you can’t remember, passive voice is when the subject of a sentence receives the action of a verb. For example: “Bob was hit by a bat” uses the passive voice. In active terms, it would be: “A bat hit Bob.”
English itself is a language that tends towards the active voice, and readers expect it. Linguists refer to this as an “iconicity assumption”—we assume that sentences will form the order in which they occur in the real world.
So when something is in passive voice, this means readers must use more brainpower to comprehend them. In studies, readers’ brains showed more activity when reading in the passive voice. Likewise, reading speed slowed down, so even if your content is simple, using passive voice makes it harder to understand and remember.
Tell them what you told them
In light of the message of this article, we’d just like to give you a few reminders. If you want your work to be comprehensible and memorable, place important information first and last, bury the bad stuff, use active voice, and relate information in terms of cause-and-effect narratives. And, of course, never be afraid to start a sentence with “and”.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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