From Mark Bayer
September 27, 2026 |
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Quote for the Week
“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
1. Write for How the Brain Reads
Hi Reader!
You just sent a two-page update to the head of your business unit. She reads the first paragraph, skims the second, and comes back with a question you actually answered in the third.
The usual explanation is that she’s busy. That’s true.
But it isn’t the interesting part.
The interesting part is she stopped reading somewhere around your second sentence, and it wasn’t really a decision.
Here’s the thing they don’t teach you: Your reader is not absorbing your sentences one at a time. She is predicting them.
Before she finishes a sentence her brain has already guessed where it’s going, and every time the guess is wrong, she pays a small tax to recover.
Susan Haviland and Herbert Clark measured that tax in 1974. They gave people pairs of sentences and timed how long the second one took to understand.
“We got some beer out of the trunk. The beer was warm.” — 835 milliseconds.
“We checked the picnic supplies. The beer was warm.” — 1,016 milliseconds.
Same second sentence. Same information. The only difference is whether the reader had already been handed the word “beer.” In the second version she has to quietly work out that beer was among the picnic supplies before she can proceed.
One hundred and eighty-one milliseconds. For one sentence.
That sounds like nothing, and for one sentence it is. Your update has ninety of them.
Ninety small taxes, none of which she notices on its own. What she notices is the sum, and the sum arrives as a feeling rather than a thought:
This is heavy going. She doesn’t blame your sentences. She blames the subject, or her calendar, or occasionally you.
So here is the reframe I’d offer, and it’s the opposite of how most technical people approach a difficult document.
Making your reader more interested in your topic can be a tall order, though it’s possible.
Making your sentences more efficient to process is much easier to do.
It turns out these two things produce almost the same result in terms of capturing and keeping your readers’ attention. But the second option is much easier for you to do.
Your reader isn’t lazy. She’s running a prediction engine, and you can either feed it the fuel it prefers or fight to keep it running.
Let’s dig in.
But first, a quick message from this week’s sponsor, who keeps One for the Week free for subscribers.
2. The Given-New Contract
LESSON 1: Open Each Sentence with What They Already Have
THE PRINCIPLE: Every sentence should begin with information already in your reader’s head and end with the part that’s new. Old information first, new information last. Linguists call this the given-new contract.
WHY IT WORKS: This is the Haviland and Clark result from the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior in 1974.
When the second sentence opened on something the first sentence had already supplied, comprehension took 835 milliseconds. When the reader had to build a bridge to get there, 1,016 milliseconds. The reader isn’t aware of the gap and can’t tell you about it afterward. She just knows the document felt like work.
THE EXAMPLE: “A revised sampling schedule was implemented in March following the stability findings.” That sentence opens on a revised sampling schedule, which is not in your reader’s head yet.
Flip it: “The stability findings in March led us to revise the sampling schedule.” Now it opens on the thing she already knew about and ends on the thing she didn’t.
Identical content. The second version requires less cognitive processing time, which saves energy. Energy conservation is a central principle of the brain’s operating system.
YOUR APPLICATION
1. Check the first six words of each sentence. If they introduce something brand new, the sentence is probably backwards.
2. Let the end of one sentence set up the start of the next. The last thing you said is the most available thing in her memory, so build the next sentence on it.
3. Suspect every sentence that opens with a passive construction. Passives are the most common way a new subject ends up in the first position.
LESSON 2: Difficulty Gets Charged to You, Not to the Complexity of the Material
THE PRINCIPLE: When a sentence is hard to read, your reader does not conclude the subject is hard. They conclude something about you.
WHY IT WORKS: Daniel Oppenheimer ran five experiments on this, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2006. He took writing samples — graduate admissions essays, dissertation abstracts, a translation of Descartes — and swapped simple words for longer synonyms without changing the meaning.
Readers rated the authors of the complex versions as less intelligent. His own framing is worth keeping: the research is “not about problems with using long words but about using long words needlessly.”
THE EXAMPLE: In Consciousness and Cognition (1999), Rolf Reber and Norbert Schwarz showed people statements in colors that were either easy or hard to read against the background. The easy-to-read statements were judged more likely to be true compared to the more difficult ones, even though they both make the same point. Same claims, same evidence, different color contrast ratio.
YOUR APPLICATION
1. Keep the long word when it is the precise one. Nobody is suggesting you water down your meaning by picking a simpler word. Instead, focus on the words you’re choosing only because they sound more serious or professional.
2. Keep your sentences to one main idea per sentence. Too many twists and turns in a sentence risk losing your readers’ attention.
3. Read the first paragraph out loud. If you run out of breath, your reader ran out of patience.
LESSON 3: Your Opening Sentence is Doing a Different Job Than You Think
THE PRINCIPLE: The “given-new” structure governs documents as well as sentences. Most technical updates open on the writer’s context. They should open on the reader’s.
WHY IT WORKS: This follows directly from the Haviland and Clark result, scaled up.
The first sentence is the one place where you have supplied your reader with nothing yet, so it is the most expensive sentence in the document. If it opens on your process, your timeline, or your last meeting, you have spent your most expensive sentence on something she has to translate before she can use it.
THE EXAMPLE: “Per our discussion on the 14th, the team has completed the supplementary analyses requested by the review committee.” Everything in that sentence is about you. Compare: “The safety question the committee raised is now answered, and the answer doesn’t change the filing date.” Her question, her calendar, her first six words.
YOUR APPLICATION
1. Write the document, then delete the first paragraph. It is usually you clearing your throat, and the real opening is sitting right underneath it. As journalists say, “Don’t bury the lede.” Often it takes writing that first paragraph to identify the lede. Once you have it down, removing the first paragraph gives the lede the prominence it needs.
2. Ask what she was worried about before she opened this. That is your first sentence.
3. My Take
Reber and Schwarz didn’t show easy-to-read statements were better argued.
They showed easy-to-read statements were believed more.
Fluency affected the truth judgment without touching the evidence.
Every claim you make arrives wrapped in a level of difficulty, and you chose that level, usually without thinking about it.
There is no neutral setting. A sentence that takes three passes to parse isn’t more honest than one that takes one pass.
Which raises something worth sitting with. If fluency moves belief without touching the evidence, then clear writing is persuasion technology. And persuasion technology works whether or not you happen to be right.
That is not an argument for writing badly. Difficulty protects no one. It just moves the credibility from your evidence to your prose, and it moves it in the wrong direction.
It is an argument for asking a second question once you’ve made the writing easier to read. Not is this clear? but does my argument still hold when someone reads it slowly?
Clarity that survives a slow read is clarity you’ve earned. Clarity that only works at speed is something else.
So write the version that’s easy to read. Then read it back like a skeptic who has all afternoon.
4. Your Monday Move
🎯 Your Monday Move
This week, how about doing this?
Find a document you’ve already sent. Not a draft you’re still working on — something that’s out the door.
Rewrite the first three sentences using the given-new pattern. Each one opens on something your reader already had, and ends on the part that’s new.
Then put the two versions side by side and read them in order.
Before: Per our discussion on the 14th, the team has completed the supplementary analyses requested by the review committee.
After: The safety question the committee raised is now answered.
Most people find the second version is also shorter, which is a side effect rather than the goal. Sentences get long when they’re carrying information in the wrong order.
Twenty minutes. One document. Three sentences.
And notice the part that stings slightly — the realization that the version you sent was harder to read than it needed to be, and that nobody was ever going to tell you.
How’d it go? Let me know! I read every response and will send you back a note.
— Mark
