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The Reader's Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer, by Yellowlees Douglas
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Have you ever found yourself re-reading the same sentence four or five times and thought "I should get more sleep"? Are you clueless as to why one paragraph just seems to "flow" while you simply can't recall the contents of another? Guess what: you are not alone. Even the best writers fail to grasp why their writing works. The Reader's Brain is the first science-based guide to writing, employing cutting-edge research on how our minds process written language, to ensure your writing can be read quickly, assimilated easily, and recalled precisely - exactly what we need to transform anyone into a highly effective writer. Using the 5Cs - clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence - this book combines irreverent humor with easy-to-follow principles that will make readers perceive your sentences, paragraphs, and documents to be clear, concise, and effective.
- Sales Rank: #199195 in Books
- Published on: 2015-08-04
- Released on: 2015-06-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .39" w x 5.08" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 225 pages
Review
"There is a lot to like in this book, not least the pragmatic examples, acerbic humor, and insights into why some writing is impenetrable."
Vint Cerf, internet pioneer and Vice President, Google
"Be warned: if you read this book, you'll see how flawed your writing is. But take heart too, because if you follow Douglas' advice, those flaws will start to disappear. Her bracing, mordant and lucid words show that good writing is a skill you can learn - and that the best way to do it is not to defer to grammarians and style gurus but to understand what goes on in the mind of the reader. In other words, you should write to be read. This book offers some of the best advice on writing that I have seen, whether you are writing a legal document or an email to your mother."
Philip Ball, science writer and author of The Music Instinct
"This book is desperately needed across great swaths of corporate America and should be taught at every level from K-12 to graduate schools."
Andrew Hargadon, Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship, Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis
From the Author
I spent the first half-dozen years I taught undergraduate writing courses, haunted by the conviction that I should refund my students' tuition at the end of each term. What made some sentences read as transparently and easily as glancing through a pane of glass, while others refused to make sense after a third rereading? Why did some writers turn out sentences that telegraphed authority, while others sounded like eight year-olds doing a crappy job on a book report? And, if books on writing had a recognizable methodology behind them, what the hell was it based on?
Wherever I looked, the scanty methodologies available were based on Aristotle's principles for oral arguments--hardly suitable for written arguments in a noisy, literate environment. Other pundits insisted on the importance of the process fledgling writers used for cranking out assignments. However, if you poked around the foundations of each approach, you ended up in the position of the woman who confronted William James after a lecture on cosmology. His whole theory was ridiculous, she said, insisting the universe rested on the back of a turtle. When James asked her what the turtle stood on, she answered, triumphantly, "It's turtles all the way down!" Books on writing had a "turtles all the way down" problem. Each book was based on the lore handed down by some predecessor, with only anecdotes by battered teachers from the trenches to shore up the advice.
But I came to writing from some thoroughly peculiar directions. I wrote one of the first dissertations on reading and hypertext, which threw me directly into the thick of some of the best research on the way our brains process written language. I spent my doctoral career immersed in cognitive and developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience, extrapolating from the clinical data principles about what made texts hang together. I also spent my earliest years as a professor simultaneously working in advertising for clients that included Cunard, GlaxoSmithKline, ICL, and Abbott Laboratories. My writing had to be readable, accessible, and make readers recall its most important points, from brochures hawking world cruises to white papers on vaccines. As a result, my approach to teaching writing became highly pragmatic. And, when I started teaching clinicians in the College of Medicine at the University of Florida, I needed a science-based methodology to convince skeptical doctors that I actually had something valuable to teach them. At that moment, I connected the utility of the data that had fueled my early research with a science-based approach to teaching writing. In addition to being easy to follow and backed by decades of empirical data, the principles I evolved appealed strongly to scientists and students who crunched numbers and were more comfortable with data than words.
This book is for those of us who (a) wondered what we were supposed to be learning in those required writing courses, (b) always wanted to know why some sentences paragraphs just seemed to work, (c) demand empirical evidence for following directions, (d) need a comprehensive, one-stop guide to writing effectively. Look no further--you've got the answers in your hand.
From the Inside Flap
√ Uses a science-based approach to writing.
√ Relies on documented research for each of its principles.
√ Makes key points readily accessible with lists, sidebars, features, and before/after examples.
√ Conveys science and principles in humorous, easy-to-read language.
√ Provides readers with a supplemental guide to grammar and punctuation, adopted as IBM as its worldwide writing style guide.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A Great Writing Book, But A Bit Soft On The Science
By Andy in Washington
I am always on the lookout for ways to improve my writing, and I was very attracted by the book's premise of applying science to the problem. The book does offer some excellent and common sense writing advice, but I found the science linkage to be a bit less than useful. Mostly it seemed that "science confirms everything every English teacher ever told you".
=== The Good Stuff ===
* The book has a neat premise. By examining how the brain reads and processes information, a writer can carefully construct sentences and paragraphs to make it easier for the brain to comprehend and absorb written information. In some ways, Yellowlees Douglass was very successful at this. For example, she shows some specific examples of how a simple subject-verb-object structure is faster and more intuitive for the brain.
* There is a lot of good common-sense advice on writing styles. The author avoids discussions of complex grammar, and there are simple examples for just about all of the points listed. Even if your grammar and language skills are a bit lacking, it is easy enough to understand the ideas presented.
* There are also some more detailed facts about how the brain actually processes ideas, including scientific analyses such as fMRI data. While this promised to be interesting, it often just became confirmation that everything you learned about good writing is confirmed by brain scans.
=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===
* Douglas occasionally forgets to list her assumptions. For example, she states a series of rules for formatting information in a paragraph, but never provides any guidance as to what type of paragraph she is writing. While her suggestions are excellent for a work of serious non-fiction, they would be inappropriate for lighter subjects or fiction. An interesting omission, since one of the early chapters cautions writers to match the writing style to the sophistication of their readers.
* The author also occasionally ignores her own advice. Again, a brief example. Just a couple pages after admonishing us to keep lists of items short and concise, there is list of 10 items in a ~150-word paragraph.
* Douglas sometimes misses the finesse behind writing. As an example, she refers to a business memo written by someone she sarcastically calls “Double Man”. She refers to a meeting summary included in this memo as wasteful and needless, since “everyone reading the memo was present at the meeting”. That may be true, but any veteran of office politics will tell you that there is often value in being the one to summarize a meeting, since it gives you a chance to recap the meeting with your own “slant”.
* There is a streak of sarcasm throughout the book. Depending on your preferences, it can either be fun or obnoxious.
=== Summary ===
I had high hopes for the book, but came away somewhat disappointed. The book, with some clean-up, could easily stand on its own as a good “how to” guide for writing. Douglas does a nice job of explaining concepts of good writing with simple examples and clear explanations.
Unfortunately, the science side is a bit lacking-mostly it comes down to saying that science agrees with what your English teacher told you.
Some of the text was very poorly written and difficult to comprehend. However, I was reading a galley copy, so this may very well be corrected by publication.
=== Disclaimer===
I was able to read an advance copy through the courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
No neuroscience beyond the title
By RF
For me, as a scientist-turned-writer, the utility of science in this book is summed up by Chapter 1's opening sentence: "Most people shun writing the way any chordate instinctively shuns pain." The science in that sentence, and this book, is superfluous. Moreover, it's so sparse you'll be surprised when it crops up!
Don't be mislead by the title. So you can save your money, I'll sum up the "science". Yellowlees will only cite a couple of semi-relevant scientific studies that may tell you how many milliseconds a reader may spend on a particular word or what area of a reader's brain processes language and tricky grammar, but none of that directly shapes the fundamentals of her writing lessons. That said, her grammatical words of wisdom are decent, but you'll find much quicker and pointed reading on this subject elsewhere.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Yellowlees Douglas Explains Strunk & White
By William H. Dutton
In her new book, The Reader’s Brain, Professor Yellowlees Douglas explains Strunk & White. That is, she explains why some of their guidelines work, and why others might need revision.
I am one of many fans of guides to good writing. Lord knows I need them. And Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (1918) is one of my favorites. It has become somewhat of the bible of guides to writing in the English language. Professor Douglas’ book is a guide to writing, but one that is so different from any that have come before.
Yellowlees Douglas has been a student and teacher of writing, such as in teaching people how to write anything from technical reports and proposals to novels. But this book is not a simple compilation of her views on best practices. Instead, it is an incredibly valuable distillation of decades of research in the social, psychological and neurosciences about how people read, such as how people process different types of prose. How does a style or approach to writing relate to how hard a reader must work, or how much they will recall?
She then takes these lessons learned from the study of readers to explain why some rules work, and others do not. In addition, Professor Douglas takes what she has learned to offer a number of very useful guides to writers, anchored in what she calls her five C’s: clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence. If you think these categories are commonsense, you will be pleasantly surprised when you dig into each in more detail, such as her critical perspective on ‘textual analytics’ as useful guides to readability (pages 11-17). And there are some cross-cutting themes, like the importance of prediction – the degree that readers are constantly trying to predict what comes next, and how you can help them.
In such ways, Yellowlees Douglas not only tells writers what they should do, but also explains why, based on studies of the reader or user. As Professor Douglas (2015: 7) notes:
“The connections seem obvious between what neuroscientists and psycholinguists have learned about the reading brain and what writers need to know when they sit down with a blank page. Yet the science of reading and the teaching of writing end up as two conversations conducted in parallel – different audiences, tuned to entirely different channels.”
Professor Douglas does a wonderful job in connecting these two conversations, while also being a gifted writer, who entertains as she teaches us how to write and why.
I crossed paths with the author in 1993, when I was directing the UK’s national Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT) in the UK. I was based office at Brunel University, where Professor Douglas was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology (CRICT). At that time, she was looking at how people read hypertext novels. Surprisingly, I thought, she found that readers did not read them as intended by their writers, but in more linear ways. Her work impressed me as an example of how you cannot assume that readers will follow along with the designs of the writer. Overtime, readers might well have become more comfortable with nonlinear hypertext paths through text online, but these are the kinds of issues that scholars like Professor Douglas can help us understand.
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