Some writing you read effortlessly. The sentences move; the paragraphs connect; you look up and find you’ve been reading for forty minutes without noticing. Some writing, on the same subject, you find yourself reading the same paragraph three times. Your eyes glaze. You check your phone. You put the article down without finishing it.
This isn’t usually because one writer is smart and the other is stupid. It’s often because one writer has, through skill or instinct, produced prose that fits how the brain actually reads — and the other has produced prose that fights it. The difference between the two is surprisingly measurable, and surprisingly learnable.
The cognitive load of reading
The basic problem most bad writing doesn’t account for is that reading is cognitively expensive. Every sentence your brain parses consumes attention — and attention is a limited resource, depleted by accumulating effort. A sentence that demands three operations is fine. A paragraph of sentences each demanding three operations starts to eat the reader’s capacity. By the third page of such writing, the reader is cognitively exhausted, whether or not they can articulate why.
This isn’t a claim about readers being weak or lazy. It’s a fact about how reading works. Daniel Kahneman’s broader work on cognitive load (which we’ve looked at in other articles in this series) established that the mind has limited capacity for deliberate effort, and that tasks which drain that capacity quickly become aversive even when they’re ostensibly interesting. Writing that doesn’t manage the reader’s cognitive load doesn’t fail because the ideas are weak. It fails because the ideas never get through the overhead of decoding the prose.
What reduces cognitive load, specifically? Three variables, well-documented in reading research:
Sentence length. Shorter sentences are, on average, easier to process than longer ones. Not always — some content requires longer sentences, and skilled writers vary length for rhythm. But the baseline effect is strong. A run of twenty-word sentences loses readers that a run of twelve-word sentences retains.
Word familiarity. Common words are processed faster than rare ones. A text full of specialised vocabulary, Latin-derived terms, and words the reader has to look up adds cognitive cost with every paragraph. Unless the technical vocabulary is essential, replacing it with everyday language almost always improves readability.
Sentence structure. Active voice, concrete subjects, and direct verb constructions are processed faster than passive voice, abstract nouns, and elaborate clause structures. The report was reviewed by the committee takes more effort than The committee reviewed the report. The meaning is identical; the cost to the reader isn’t.
These are the variables measured by the various readability formulas — Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and others — developed over the last century to quantify how difficult a piece of prose is to read. The formulas are imperfect but they point at something real. You can measure, approximately, how much cognitive work a given text demands. Most writing could demand less.
Pinker and the curse of knowledge
The most useful recent book on how good writing actually works is Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, published in 2014. Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, drew on research in cognitive psychology and linguistics to explain why good writing is hard — and why so much writing, even by clearly intelligent writers, turns out poorly.
The central concept Pinker emphasises is what he calls the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, it’s extremely difficult to accurately remember what it was like not to know it. The writer has a topic, a framework, a set of implicit assumptions, and a vocabulary of familiar-to-them terms. What they forget is that the reader has none of these. The writer’s prose is shaped by their own mental model, which the reader does not share. Sentences that feel clear to the writer — because they’re consistent with everything the writer already knows — can be baffling to the reader who doesn’t have the same background.
This is why technical writing is often so bad. Not because the writers are unskilled but because they’ve been immersed in their field for so long that they can’t feel the distance between what they know and what their readers know. They use jargon that feels transparent to them because everyone around them uses it. They skip over steps that feel obvious to them because they’ve done the reasoning thousands of times. The reader, encountering this, finds prose that assumes too much and explains too little.
Pinker’s practical advice is roughly: imagine a specific, intelligent, but not-expert reader, and write for them. Explain what your technical terms mean. Spell out the reasoning chain rather than skipping steps. When in doubt, assume the reader doesn’t have the background, and supply what’s missing.
The reverse error is also real. Sometimes writers so anticipate their readers’ confusion that they over-explain, producing prose that an intelligent reader finds condescending. The skill is calibration — reading what you’ve written not as the expert you are, but as the intelligent non-expert you’re actually writing for.
The opacity of academic writing
A related but darker research tradition comes from the Australian scholar Helen Sword, whose book Stylish Academic Writing analysed thousands of academic papers across disciplines to understand why academic writing has become so consistently difficult to read.
Sword’s finding was that the opacity isn’t accidental — or at least, it isn’t only accidental. Academic writing has, over decades, developed into a specific register that signals professional membership. Using complicated sentence structures, Latinate vocabulary, passive constructions and layered subordinate clauses marks the writer as an insider. Writing clearly and directly — in the kind of prose that ordinary readers could follow — risks being seen as unserious by other academics. The opacity is rewarded, not punished, within academic culture.
This produces a strange situation. Scholars whose discoveries could benefit wider audiences are systematically trained to write in a way that prevents those audiences from accessing the discoveries. Fields with important practical implications — public health, climate science, economics, law — often communicate with the public only through intermediaries who can translate the academic prose into something readable. The translation is expensive, slow, and lossy. Much of what scholars know doesn’t reach the people who would most benefit from knowing it.
Sword’s recommendation, for anyone wanting to write well about intellectually serious material, is to resist the pull toward the opaque register — even if it’s what the surrounding culture rewards. Write as if you wanted to be read by non-experts. Use concrete language. Let your examples breathe. Don’t hide behind jargon when plain language would do. This is harder than it sounds, because the academic register is contagious — once you’ve read enough of it, producing it feels normal. The deliberate practice of clarity, against the gravitational pull of opacity, is one of the most valuable writing disciplines anyone who writes seriously can cultivate.
The counter-thread worth hearing
Before endorsing simplicity wholesale, a caveat.
Some complexity in writing is genuinely necessary. Certain ideas cannot be accurately expressed in short simple sentences. Subtle distinctions require nuanced language. Long-form argument sometimes demands the long sentences that can carry extended reasoning without breaking the thought. Stripping out complexity can strip out meaning. The reader who says this should be simpler sometimes means I wish this didn’t require as much of me as it does, and simplifying would mean either losing the argument or saying something shallower than the original.
This means the goal isn’t simplicity for its own sake. It’s appropriate complexity — as much as the material requires, and no more. A physics paper will necessarily be more demanding than a news article about the same physics, and a serious philosophical argument will necessarily ask more of the reader than a summary of the same argument would. The question isn’t is this easy to read? but is this as easy as it could be while still saying what it actually needs to say?
Distinguishing necessary from unnecessary complexity is itself a skill. Most bad prose errs toward unnecessary complexity — artefacts of the curse of knowledge, the pull of academic register, the writer’s reluctance to simplify their own work. But some prose has been simplified beyond what its subject can support, and the result is prose that’s easy to read and wrong about what it’s describing. Both failures are real.
What to practise
For a Year 12 or early-university writer learning to produce prose that actually gets read, a few specific moves are worth building into your practice.
Read your own writing out loud. The single most useful editing practice there is. Places where you stumble reading aloud are usually places where your reader will stumble silently. Sentences that are too long, rhythms that are awkward, transitions that don’t quite work — all of these become audible in a way they aren’t when you’re reading silently. Almost every experienced writer does this, and almost every beginner skips it.
Watch your sentence lengths. After drafting, count the words in each of your sentences for a paragraph or two. If most of them are over twenty-five words, the paragraph is probably harder to read than it needs to be. Not a strict rule — sometimes a long sentence is right — but worth noticing.
Name concrete things rather than abstract ones. The policy caused unintended consequences is weaker than The policy doubled waiting times for heart surgery. The second gives the reader something to see; the first asks them to supply their own imagery. Writing that shows specific things to a reader is almost always more engaging than writing that describes abstractions.
Use active voice by default. The data were analysed is safely academic and largely empty. We analysed the data or The analysis showed is clearer. Passive voice has legitimate uses — when the agent is unknown, when the object matters more than the actor — but it’s over-used in most writing.
Kill the words that aren’t doing work. Phrases like in order to (usually to is enough), it is important to note that (usually the point without the announcement is stronger), at this point in time (usually now works), due to the fact that (usually because) are verbal furniture that adds length without meaning. Removing them almost always improves the prose.
Read the kind of writing you want to produce. If you want to write clearly, read clear writers. If you want to write with rhythm, read writers whose prose has rhythm. Your ear develops by exposure, and it develops toward whatever you read most. Much of what’s called talent, in writing, is ear — and ear is mostly pattern-matching from extensive reading.
The question that remains
The deep thing behind all this research is that writing is a kind of hospitality. You’re inviting the reader into a mental space; you can either make the space comfortable or make it hostile. Good writers notice the comfort of the reader’s experience and adjust accordingly. Bad writers, through the curse of knowledge or through imitation of opaque registers or through sheer absence of care, produce spaces that punish the people who try to enter.
Most students aren’t bad writers because they can’t think. They produce prose that loses readers because nobody has ever told them that the reader’s experience is something to manage. Once you start thinking about the reader as a person with limited attention, whose time you’re asking for, whose confusion you’re responsible for — the practice of writing changes. Your own prose starts to look different when you read it with that lens.
The question worth carrying, especially the next time you finish a draft of something:
If someone else were reading this — someone intelligent but not expert in your subject, who had many other demands on their time — would they stay with you to the end, or would they quietly put it down after the second page?
Key research referenced: Daniel Kahneman on cognitive load; Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (2014) and the “curse of knowledge”; Rudolf Flesch’s readability research and later formulas; Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing (2012).