Good Writing Is Good Mind-Reading

During my PhD, I spent several years teaching at Oxford. In that time, I learned a great deal about writing. Oxford students are expected to write at least one essay every week. We teachers then use those essays as the basis of our one-on-one lessons. So, I’ve read a lot of essays. And to avoid madness, I didn’t just teach my students philosophy; I also taught them to write clearly. In this style guide, I share some of those lessons.

It’s hard to make yourself understood. Sometimes you write something that makes perfect sense to you. Then you torture a friend, colleague, or mentor by making them read it. And then they hit you up with the strangest comments and questions.

This happened to me for years. My poor PhD supervisor, Tom Sinclair, would read draft-chapters of my thesis, and proceed to pour out an ocean of blood-red ink into comments and question marks. I’d often find these comments confusing. So, we’d meet up for doctoral supervision sessions and hash it out.

I was the problem. Tom got lost trying to decipher my words, and so he wrote comments based on his best guess at what I meant. He would assume I hadn’t thought things through enough because my writing was unclear, but when I explained things in-person he was surprised to discover that I had something interesting to say. Together, we figured out the problem: I was writing for myself.

I’d sit down, figure out what I wanted to say, write it, and read it to check if it made sense to me. At no point did I spare a thought for what poor Tom might think. At no point did I imagine myself in his shoes or how his perspective might make it hard to see what seemed crystal clear to me.

But once I started reading my words from his perspective, it changed everything about my writing. I’d anticipate misunderstandings, give more illustrative examples, and make it clear what I’m not saying. Tom was grateful, and I’m sure he saved a fortune on red ink.

But this principle, give the people what they want, applies far beyond content. It also applies to writing style.

Style isn’t just about personal preference or expressing your inner auteur. It is painfully practical. Style determines how hard your reader has to work to make sense of what you’re saying.

That’s because readers have expectations about how information is supposed to be organised. When you frustrate those expectations, you make your reader work way harder to understand you. Given that every human brain has a limited number of fucks to give, there’s only so much work you can make your reader do before they rage-quit and curse your family name for twelve generations.

The reason for this is worth a nerdy digression.

Turns out, processing new information is hard. It requires calories, and that makes it expensive from the perspective of evolution. To cut costs, the brain developed a strategy of predicting the future. That’s because it’s far cheaper to process new information as error correction for a predictive model than it is to process everything about the new information from scratch. A little surprise is the spice that keeps things interesting. Too much surprise is the five-alarm chilli powder that makes the dish inedible.

So if you want to make your writing easier to understand, then you have to learn how your reader expects to receive information, and then give the people what they want.

To help you do just that, we’ll have a look at two principles from George Gopen’s Reader Expectation Approach to writing. If you want to check it out for yourself, just click this link here.

Let’s start with the sentence. This is the most natural unit of meaning, and so there are naturally strong expectations for how it ought to be structured.

First among these expectations is how the sentence should begin. Gopen calls the beginning of the sentence the topic position. This is where the reader expects to find their answer to the question, what are you talking about.

If something is in the topic position, then the reader will assume the sentence is about that thing.

So consider the following three examples.

• Jack’s apartment was filled with laughter coming from the guests.