The Single Reason Why People Can’t Write, According to a Harvard Psychologist
By Legal Skills Prof, November 30, 2019
This post has been viewed 5,400 times.
Here’s the subtitle:
“This common affliction is behind so much unclear and confusing writing in the world today.” That’s better.
Excerpts:
“For Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls “the Curse of Knowledge”, which he defines as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”
The solution:
“How can we lift the curse of knowledge?” asks Pinker. “A considerate writer will…cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in ‘Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,’ rather than the bare ‘Arabidopsis.’ It’s not just an act of magnanimity: A writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk.”
