Reasons Why People Can’t Write

All of us have faced the writing problems at least once in their life. You may ask what I mean when I say writing problems. First of all, you should know and understand that this issue may be considered with two perspectives – from author’s and reader’s sides. The part of the author is responsible for creating texts, its style and content, when the reader is a person who perceives this text, try to understand it and extract necessary information. Very often the process of transferring information from the writer to the reader runs coherently.

Writings overloaded with clichés, technical terms, jargon, and abbreviations, on the contrary, confuse readership and interferes with understanding what the author really means.

According to the words of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinkersuch experience is caused by the phenomenon called “the Curse of Knowledge”. The essence is that it’s pretty difficult to imagine things you know, when these things are unknown for other people. He argues that this is the only reasonable explanation why bad prose may be created by good people. Argot (in the sense of the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study) and jargon are two phenomena, the emergence of which is fully justified. People involved in one joint occupation develop their own specific type of language; it is more convenient and doesn’t require long explanations every time they want to mention some concept. The issue is that communication between enthusiasts of one sphere can’t be interpreted properly by ordinary audience of readers.

People of business may be considered as a group that is especially fond of such “language”. Moreover, there is every reason to talk about separate English business dialect. In general, business English is a big combination of terms and acronyms, and this wide array of business school vocabulary is transmitted by the users to their everyday life. Gradually the business vocabulary stops being verbal means of communication and gets into the field of writing. The scope of use in writing impresses – emails, chats in messengers, presentations and official business proposals, but still it is not a key point of this article.

How can you overcome the curse of knowledge? Frankly speaking, the solutions to the issue aren’t very complicated. All you need to do is to correct a little bit your manner of writing – add an explanation to the terms, just a few words will be enough. Such a small step can greatly increase the number of readers. Alternative way to improve your writings is to use examples, they can hardly be called full explanations, but it’s better than nothing. Include in your paper such as, for example, as in, and this will greatly facilitate comprehension of the text by the readers.

If the sentence you write makes you feel confused and think twice what it means, just imagine the reaction of the readers. While writing you should make sure that everything is clear to you, in this case your chances to be understood by other people will grow. This approach is a universal one and may be applied in different situations. Before sharing your writing with the world you need to clearly and, most importantly, honestly determine to what extend your text is understandable to the others, otherwise, you won’t succeed.