{"id":"b53cb721-6095-4aeb-8741-c3a61df04929","slug":"s12e53-write-clearly-or-carry-a-bigger-brain","subject":"s12e53: Write clearly, or carry a bigger brain","title":"Write clearly, or carry a bigger brain","publish_date":"2022-09-20T02:48:53.401441+00:00","year":2022,"month":9,"season":12,"episode":53,"episode_label":"s12e53","canonical_url":"https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s12e53-write-clearly-or-carry-a-bigger-brain/","is_premium":0,"word_count":507,"body_html":"

0.0 Context Setting

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It is Monday, September 19, 2022 and I am just outside of St. Louis, where I've been on a work trip. It's very hot here -- around 91 degrees Fahrenheit. This is also my first work trip since the beforetimes. It turns out that traveling from Pacific to Central Time is not great because the two hour time difference is just irritatingly inconvenient.

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Here's a photograph of Fox News in the lobby of my hotel early this morning:

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\"Fox

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

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Short again today.

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Write clearly, or carry a bigger brain

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This one has gone around the houses a bit, but maybe you haven't seen it yet. Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language[1] is a 2022 paper that thinks contracts are hard for people to understand because they exhibit

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Anyway, the point is in the title which is that contracts are just written unclearly and it's not because "the law" is hard to understand, it's that it (potentially!) is written intentionally to be hard to understand. Or maybe even unintentionally.

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Caught my attention because: this (legal language) is a subset/sibling of Business Language, and you really, really, really, really, really need to be able to write clearly. I say this, of course, while writing and jabbing keys for this newsletter.

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Oh, wait. One interesting piece:

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"such processing difficulties result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies (i.e., poor writing)"

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Okay, yes, on the one hand good writing doesn't produce long-distance syntactic dependencies, and on the other hand, some great works of literature are also I'd argue easy to understand and parse even though they exhibit long-distance syntactic dependencies. But the objective of those different types of writing is probably different, too.

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But anyway, anyway, the interesting thing here is well of course you could improve your writing so that it fits within your working memory limitation set (which I interpret to be along the lines of why phone numbers are in the digit patterns they're in, e.g. in the US three-three-four) or it might be more exciting if we improved our working memory limitation set. Just imagine the kinds of business writing and literature we could have as a species if our working memory / global workspace were larger!

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Okay, that's it. It's late and I have to get up early.

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Did you have a good weekend? I can't even remember the weekend. I hope you had a good one.

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Best,

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Dan

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  1. Martínez E, Mollica F, Gibson E. Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language. Cognition. 2022 Jul;224:105070. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105070. Epub 2022 Mar 4. PMID: 35257980. ↩︎

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    2. \n
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\n","body_text":"0.0 Context Setting\n\nIt is Monday, September 19, 2022 and I am just outside of St. Louis, where I've been on a work trip. It's very hot here -- around 91 degrees Fahrenheit. This is also my first work trip since the beforetimes. It turns out that traveling from Pacific to Central Time is not great because the two hour time difference is just irritatingly inconvenient.\n\nHere's\na photograph of Fox News in the lobby of my hotel\nearly this morning:\n\n1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention\n\nShort again today.\n\nWrite clearly, or carry a bigger brain\n\nThis one has gone around the houses a bit, but maybe you haven't seen it yet. Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language\n[1]\nis a 2022 paper that thinks contracts are hard for people to understand because they exhibit\n\na lot of low-frequency jargon (i.e. rare, specialized, specific words and phrases, I think)\n\n\"center embedded clauses\" which I think means that you need to evaluate and unravel long, complicated sentences and phrases\n\npassive voice (which we're told is terrible and nobody should use anyway); and\n\nnon-standard Capitalization (which I'd argue is a subset of the low-frequency jargon)\n\nAnyway, the point is in the title which is that contracts are just written unclearly and it's not because \"the law\" is hard to understand, it's that it (potentially!) is written intentionally to be hard to understand. Or maybe even unintentionally.\n\nCaught my attention because: this (legal language) is a subset/sibling of Business Language, and you really, really, really, really, really need to be able to write clearly. I say this, of course, while writing and jabbing keys for this newsletter.\n\nOh, wait. One interesting piece:\n\n\"such processing difficulties result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies (i.e., poor writing)\"\n\nOkay,\nyes\n, on the one hand good writing doesn't produce long-distance syntactic dependencies, and on the other hand, some great works of literature are\nalso\nI'd argue easy to understand and parse even though they exhibit long-distance syntactic dependencies. But the objective of those different types of writing is probably different, too.\n\nBut anyway,\nanyway\n, the interesting thing here is well of course you could improve your writing so that it fits within your working memory limitation set (which I interpret to be along the lines of why phone numbers are in the digit patterns they're in, e.g. in the US three-three-four)\nor\nit might be more exciting if we improved our working memory limitation set. Just imagine the kinds of business writing and literature we could have as a species if our working memory / global workspace were larger!\n\nOkay, that's it. It's late and I have to get up early.\n\nDid you have a good weekend? I can't even remember the weekend. I hope you had a good one.\n\nBest,\n\nDan\n\nMartínez E, Mollica F, Gibson E.\nPoor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language\n. Cognition. 2022 Jul;224:105070. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105070. Epub 2022 Mar 4. PMID: 35257980.\n↩︎","raw_format":"markdown","source":"app","summary":"This issue examines a research paper showing that legal language is difficult to parse because of poor writing—long sentences, rare jargon, passive voice, and odd capitalization—rather than because the underlying concepts are inherently complex. The author uses this finding as a springboard for reflecting on how clearer writing could serve both practical business communication and perhaps even literature, while also entertaining the speculative idea that expanding human working memory might allow for more sophisticated syntactic complexity without sacrificing clarity.","reading_minutes":3,"links":[{"url":"https://www.flickr.com/photos/danhon/52370581421/in/dateposted-public/","normalized_url":"https://flickr.com/photos/danhon/52370581421/in/dateposted-public","domain":"flickr.com","anchor_text":"a photograph of Fox News in the lobby of my hotel","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://www.flickr.com/photos/danhon/52370581421/in/dateposted-public/","normalized_url":"https://flickr.com/photos/danhon/52370581421/in/dateposted-public","domain":"flickr.com","anchor_text":null,"is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35257980/","normalized_url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35257980","domain":"nih.gov","anchor_text":"Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"}],"sections":[{"id":3838,"ord":0,"number":"0.0","heading":"Context Setting","level":1,"word_count":80},{"id":3839,"ord":1,"number":"1.0","heading":"Some Things That Caught My Attention","level":1,"word_count":9},{"id":3840,"ord":2,"number":null,"heading":"Write clearly, or carry a bigger brain","level":2,"word_count":416}]}