Fifteen Eighty Four

To become a better writer, stop imitating published writing—and follow the science

If only writers knew the unnecessary effort their texts inflict on hapless readers, they would change the way they put together sentences, paragraphs, and entire documents. Bizarrely, despite decades of data on the reading brain, teachers and books on writing still talk about words on the page is if writing were some kind of black box, where we only know the inputs and outputs, but the product itself remains both a mystery and an art.

But, ironically, we live in an era where researchers in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics have uncovered precisely how our reading brains make sense of words on a page. In particular, researchers have uncovered the features of sentences that cause readers to perceive sentences as clear.

Three Phases of Reading

When we read, our brains move through three phases of reading comprehension. First, we identify the meanings of words and the roles they play in sentences. In English, this step can prove dicey, as a single word can function as a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, which also influences its meaning.

Yet seasoned readers are scarcely conscious of this step, as they immediately move onto the next one: understanding the interplay between meaning and sentence structure. Eye-tracking studies demonstrate that readers’ eyes linger longest on nouns, pronouns, and verbs, particularly toward the beginnings of sentences and clauses. Finally, in the third phase of reading, we make inferences about meaning, both within and across sentences.

Places Subjects and Verbs Close Together, Near the Beginnings of Sentences

As we read sentences, we seek the subjects and verbs to predict how the sentence structure plays out. As a result, writers unwittingly torment readers when they imitate the writing they see published daily in newspapers, magazines, books. Take this example from Caroline Alexander’s Skies of Thunder:

Through wild, uninhabited country, through high passes, up steep ranges and into valleys, past cavernous limestone caves, into the land of aboriginal inhabitants who spoke no Chinese, passing the fourteen-thousand-foot Tsang Shan range, skirting lakes and the junction with the old Tea Road leading north to Tibet, into the rich-fruited land of the Salween river country, feared for its virulent malaria, the surveyors walked and were carried by their sure-footed bearers over a landscape and through populations that had never seen a wheeled vehicle, up to the village of Man Hsien, or Barbarian Limits, on the Burma border.

In this sentence, readers slog through the first 65 words, seeking the subject and verb before they can grasp the structure of a sentence we can only understand if we re-read it. Furthermore, once readers encounter more than seven or eight words before a grammatical subject, reading speeds slow down and comprehension begins to fall off. As a result, readers will skim through the descriptions she intended to set the scene, desperately seeking the subject and verb.

Sentences Have Dead Zones for Recall

Worse still, Alexander buried the subject and verb deep inside the sentence in a dead zone for memory. In sentences, readers recall content from the first 25% of the sentence clearly, stemming from primacy effects in memory. Similarly, we also recall the last 25% of sentences, which we recall more strongly based on our recency effects in recall. In contrast, the middles of sentences, particularly long ones, fall into the equivalent of memory’s black hole.

We also read sentences with less effort—or cognitive load—in sentences that clearly convey cause and effect or, “who did what to whom,” as Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky puts it.

To Boost Clarity, Use Cause, Effect—and Actors

Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of South Australia, used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), to spot brains reacting to meaning and word order in sentences. Unsurprisingly, when the subjects of sentences are nouns clearly capable of performing actions, readers process sentences with greater speed and less effort. For actors, writers can choose people, organizations, publications—any individual, group, or item, intentionally created, that generates impact.

However, readers struggle when writers use abstractions as grammatical subjects, as in this example from a study on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Her examination of the social and economic obstacles female writers faced due to the presumption that women had no place in literary professions and so were instead relegated to the household, particularly resonated with her audience of young women who had struggled to fight for their right to study at their colleges, even after the political successes of the suffragettes.

In this sentence, readers might spot examination as the grammatical subject, but must work to infer the meaning of examination, an abstract noun that many readers may incorrectly picture as a test or a session with the family doctor, rather than a type of analysis. Moreover, the writer compounds the sentence’s challenges to readers by inserting 30 words between the grammatical subject, examination, and its verb, resonated. Nevertheless with a few tweaks, this little passage becomes clearer, while the concreteness of the subjects and verbs also pares words from the sentence.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf examined social and economic obstacles female writers faced. Despite the political success of the suffragettes, writers like Woolf battled the perception that women lacked a place in the literary professions. Thus Woolf’s book resonated with her audience, young women who had to fight for the right to study at their colleges.

In the revised example, subjects and verbs appear near the beginnings of sentences, also situated close together. This sentence structure bolsters readers’ ability to grasp the way the sentence’s syntax works, which also eases inferential processing. For the first two sentences, Virginia Woolf and writers serve as agents. But the third sentence relies on the next-clearest candidate for grammatical subjects: concrete objects like book.

Avoid Pronouns as Subjects

Writers rely on pronouns to begin sentences, especially demonstrative pronouns like this, that, these, and those, as well as the nearly ubiquitous it. Nevertheless, pronouns number among the features of sentences that slow down reading speeds and turn comprehension fuzzy. In addition, when writers use pronouns, they save themselves effort—at their readers’ expense.

First, pronouns send readers backward to determine the meaning of this and these. But, in contrast, readers make sense of sentences through anticipating what comes next. For instance, our eyes clearly perceive as many as nine characters to the right in the fovea, the part of the retina with the clearest focus. This adaptation is particularly useful in helping readers predict the structure of sentences in a language where we read from left to right. In contrast, we perceive only three characters to the left. This feature ensures that readers will seldom glance back to figure out the meaning of pronouns.

But readers encounter two further sets of challenges from pronouns as grammatical subjects. First, readers assume that pronouns refer to a singular noun, rather than a cluster of nouns, a phrase, or even an entire sentence. Second and more importantly, when writers use these pronouns without anchoring nouns, readers slow down and frequently misidentify the pronoun referents. In fact, in one study readers rated writing samples with high numbers of sentences using demonstrative pronouns like this and that as being less well-written than sentences that used actors as subjects or pronouns anchored by nouns. And, finally, pronouns as subjects often rely on non-action verbs, pushing the meaningful nouns and verbs further into sentences—and into dead zones for recall.

For example, consider this stellar example from a grammar textbook:

From a grammatical perspective, it is perfectly acceptable to use a noun clause starting with “That” as the subject of a sentence. However, for many, it sounds too unnatural.

Note how the words it is work simply as placeholders in the sentence without it referring to anything—virtually always true when it begins a sentence. In addition, the second it sends readers back over 50 characters to That, itself a placeholder that lacks any definite meaning in this sentence.

But, with a bit of effort and insight into how writing works in our reading brains, the writer could have written a sentence far easier to read that also offered readers more meaning for their effort.

Writers can begin sentences with noun clauses. Even a sentence beginning with the ungainly That is grammatically correct, despite sounding unnatural. If only writing were like singing in public, we would all be better writers—and have better published examples nudging us toward greater clarity. Most people remain restrict their singing to the shower or car because they long ago spotted incredulity or outright horror when they sang before audiences that included other people. In contrast, most writers today lack insight into how writing works—and remain blissfully unaware of how much unnecessary work their writing inflicts on their readers’ brains.