In this Inc magazine article, author and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker writes that “the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls ‘the Curse of Knowledge‘, which he defines as ‘a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose‘.”
If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.
– Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist (source: Inc.)
Pinker says if he doesn’t understand something, then that might be clear to others as well.
Every human pastime –music, cooking, sports, art, theoretical physics –develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to say or type a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in each other’s company. The problem is that as we become proficient at our job or hobby we come to use these catchwords so often that they flow out of our fingers automatically, and we forget that our readers may not be members of the clubhouse in which we learned them.
“How can we lift the curse of knowledge?”. “A considerate writer will…cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in ‘Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,’ rather than the bare ‘Arabidopsis.’ It’s not just an act of magnanimity: A writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk.
Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as, because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all.
– Steven Pinker from Inc.
Steven Pinker recommendss “Before hitting publish and sending your writing out to the world, it’s better to be honest with yourself about how much your reader is likely to understand a given passage or sentence. Before you commit your writing to print– or to the internet– take a few moments to make sure that what you write is clear and understandable by as many of your intended readers as possible.”