Trading the esoteric for the understandable

Continuing our summer series on Steven Pinker's book The Sense of Style, this week we look at what Pinker calls, "The curse of knowledge." Pinker explains that writers who are experts in their subject-matter often write about it poorly simply because they cannot remember what it was like before they were experts or before they understood their subject-matter. He argues that writers rarely muddy their writing with jargon intentionally, but because they are describing it through the concepts that they know like the back of their hands, and yet their readers do not understand.

Pinker then breaks down how we as writers can start recognizing the esoteric nature of our writing and revise to translate these concepts to our readers.

Chunking
As you become an expert, as a way of remembering and using the barrage of information of which you control, you must create umbrella concepts to package the smaller ideas and concepts that you've mastered. This "chunking" of concepts is useful to the researcher in this way. The problem comes when the researcher sits down to write a grant application and uses all of the high-level concepts she has been thinking about without any explanation of those same concepts for the reviewers.

Functional fixity
In addition to chunking, Pinker suggests that experts also develop a fixation on the function of objects, which they themselves are focused on, instead of offering descriptors of the objects themselves. So, for instance, Pinker uses the example below:

Focus on function: "Participants were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation" (p. 73).
Focus on description: "We tested the students in a quiet room" (p. 73).

We realize that in the first example, the researcher was focused on what makes the conditions optimal (and in what way they were optimal). But in the second example, it's much clearer to the lay audience what she's talking about, because she described the room instead of focusing on its function. 

Technical terminology 
Now certainly chunking and functional fixity can lend itself to a researcher using technical terminology or jargon in their grant proposals. But, sometimes researchers are just using a term that could be easily substituted. Pinker offers a relevant example, when he suggests that researchers instead of saying "murine model" say "with rats and mice."

To combat these, Pinker suggests that being aware of the gap between our knowledge, as experts, and our readers, as lesser-experts (in our area) is key to being able to write for our audience. But, he also suggests that after we complete a draft that we put it away for a while and then re-read and revise the draft with a fresh perspective. Additionally, have a representative of your audience review a draft and give you feedback on what is confusing and what might be more helpful.

There's really no way around the gap of knowledge that occurs between an expert and a novice, but experts can still write well for novices by acknowledging the gap and bridging it through writing.

Resources:
Write for your Reader: A Plain Language Handbook - NWT Literacy Council