Here's a snippet of excellent Friday writing advice from Sam McNerney at Big Think:
"I think fluency explains why one hallmark of good writing is clarity. If written language is a window into the writer’s world, then wordy prose diminishes the reader’s chance of understanding that world. Here’s the rub: despite easy-to-digest principles that encourage fluent writing (e.g., 'omit needless words' and 'when in doubt, cut'), many writers fill page after page with verbose paragraphs much more difficult to understand, hopefully, than this one.
"There are at least two reasons why. First, everything we write is fluent to us. The challenge is to know how comprehensible a piece of writing is for the reader. This is difficult because it’s nearly impossible for you, the writer, to know what it is like for your reader to not know something you know. Psychologists term this the 'curse of knowledge' and one byproduct is using jargon unknowingly. If, for example, I write, 'Cartesian mind-body dualism is at odds with modern neuroscience' I may wrongfully assume that a reader has a background in either philosophy or contemporary cognitive science.
"There are a few ways to avoid the curse of knowledge. The easiest is to show a draft to a friend and ask him if it makes sense. Stepping away from a draft also helps. Research suggests that apocryphal stories of warm baths, long walks and ping-pong matches giving rise to moments of insight contain some scientific merit. An effortless activity refreshes the mind, so when you return to your draft it’s easier to notice previously overlooked errors.
"The second reason is less obvious. When I ask writers for advice, many recommend that I read other successful writers and 'steal' from them. This is good advice. However, the problem with learning how to write by reading good writers is a lot like trying to understand a magic trick by watching a magician preform it: it’s not obvious what makes the trick work and it’s easy to overlook the hours of practice the magician spent perfecting it. A cogent and lucid novel is likewise illusionary. It’s not apparent why it works – it just does. Importantly, the novel does not include the hundreds of thousands of words and paragraphs – even chapters – omitted from previous drafts. Like an aspiring magician, the aspiring writer cannot simply study a piece of prose by reading it; he must focus on the concealed details that make the final draft work while remembering the countless hours the author spent revising, rejecting, sifting and selecting.
"In sum, good writing is easy to read but writing well is difficult to do. Aspiring writers forget this and fall victim to what I call the illusion of simplicity, or the tendency to conflate the fluency of a piece of prose with how easy it is to write something of equal value. A professor of mine used to harp on what he termed the 'golden first draft bias.' His point is that because nearly everything we read – magazines, newspapers and books – is a final draft we mistakenly conclude that it was the only draft. As a result, his students – including me – believe that there’s no need to revise."
That "curse of knowledge" thing?
Yes. Something I definitely need to work on in my own writing.
