The Single Reason Why People Can't Write, According to a Harvard Psychologist


If you write like you’re trying to explain something to an 8 yo, you might actually communicate better with adults.

Good article. I am fortunate that many people can't write. Technical writing and editing has been my bread and butter for many long years.

Writing in the language of the shop floor is a balancing act.
On the one hand: if you spoon-feed a highly technical audience, they will dismiss you as not credible. On the other hand: if you don't set up a ladder to the second floor, the new guy will be lost, frustrated, and demoralized.

So, I agree that bad writing is defined by a failure to communicate with the target audience.

And you do know who your primary audience is, don't you? (Did you bother to find out?) It's the foundation of good writing. It's essential to put yourself in their shoes, to know their knowledge level and how they perceive the world. Good writing communicates effectively by being in sync with the reader; and that makes it possible to subtly motivate and pull the reader toward greater understanding and desirable actions.

My 2c.

Academics excel at this pretentious crap -

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. - Doctor Judith Butler (claimed by some to be one of the ten smartest people on the planet - but not by me)

http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

Writing, speech is not always intended to explain or to provide information to the general public. My colleagues in the ER spoke in a patois of slang, abbreviation, acronym and ellipsis designed to communicate efficiently and quickly within the team, with a byproduct of excluding those outside the group and enhancing group solidarity.

I suspect that brantb's example of prolix. pleonastic, sesquipedalian academic language was intended to enhance the authors status as a member of the intellectual elite rather than to educate the masses.

And then there are those who can write quite well and be accurte and informative to boot; https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552

Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond has always impressed me as a very fine synthesis of human history. And there are lots o folks, perhaps not quit a brilliant, who communicate quite well