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Key points
- Put stress-worthy information in the “stress position” because it improves communication.
- Begin all sentences with a “backward link” because it increases readability.
- Put the “contract statement” for an entire text in the last sentence of the document’s first paragraph.
Coauthored with George Gopen
Whether writing is good or bad can be judged by a simple question: Did the reader understand the writer’s message? If the answer is yes, the writing was good enough; if the answer is no, the writing was not good enough. That’s it.
Although writing is both an art and a science, most people neither master its art nor understand its science. Duke Emeritus Professor George Gopen, who has devoted 50 years to studying the art and science of writing, has explored how readers go about the act of reading. I have been fortunate to work with Gopen one on one, where he taught me how to write with the reader in mind. There are three key principles that can help us understand how readers make sense of prose.
1. Stress Position
The most important tool at a writer’s disposal is emphasis. If the writer can indicate which words in a sentence should be emphasized, their chance of accurately communicating greatly increases.
If the words that should be emphasized were printed in red, then everyone would be clear about the writer’s intention. Readers would instinctively build a crescendo toward the red words, internally emphasize them when they got there, and then decrescendo to the end of the sentence. Alas, nobody would be comfortable with our doing that on a regular basis.
However, writers have another way of indicating emphasis in a sentence that readers subconsciously know, yet few writers consciously make use of: structural location.
Readers naturally wish to apply greater emphasis to any moment in a sentence where the grammatical structure comes to a halt.
In Gopen’s research, he calls this location the stress position. It occurs not only at every period but also at every properly used colon and semicolon. It can never occur at a comma. The number-one problem in most people’s writing, according to Gopen, is the failure to locate the most stress-worthy information in the stress position. Among the thousands of research scientists with whom Gopen has worked one on one, he says that there were just two who didn’t commit this error on a regular basis. Astonishing, but true.
If you can consistently place the most stress-worthy information in the stress position, the quality of your communication will soar.
2. Backward Link
In addition to these stress position concerns, there are many essential questions in every sentence read to which readers must have the right answer. These include “What’s going on here?”; “Whose story is this?”; and “How does this sentence link to its neighboring sentences?”
The stress position question is the single most important; the second most important is how the present sentence links backward to the one that has just ended.
When a reader begins reading any sentence (apart from the opening sentence), their first concern is identifying which piece of information in the previous sentence connects to this new sentence. Two potential pitfalls can destroy a reader’s ability to follow the writer’s thought logically from one sentence to another. Both have to do with this backward link.
The first problem occurs when, at the beginning of a new sentence, there is no backward link. Consider a sentence that has seven “chunks” of information in it; let’s represent these as A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. If the next sentence begins with no obvious link to any of those seven, it puts the reader in the difficult position of figuring out how the writer’s thoughts are moving from the first sentence to the second.
Whenever a writer puts the burden of interpretation completely on the reader’s shoulders, the reader must use far too much energy to understand this new sentence. In effect, the writer has forced the reader to take on the role of co-author. The more often a reader must act as co-author, the foggier the writer’s message becomes, and the more fatigued the reader gets.
The second problem is even worse. What if the writer wants the reader to continue forward with the thought represented by G, but begins the next sentence with B? According to Gopen’s research, Most readers, primed to connect this new sentence with the previous one, will make a B-to-B connection and, thus, be on the wrong track. Once there, it requires a great deal of effort to repair the damage and return to the right track.
It is therefore essential that writers begin every sentence with a clear gesture back to the previous sentence so that the reader can follow the progression of the thought accurately. It doesn’t always have to be a repetition of a specific word but it does have to be a clear backward link.
3. Contract Statement
Readers want to know early on what the piece they’re reading is going to be about. Therefore, the single most rigid reader expectation concerns the location of the “contract statement.” According to Gopen’s scholarship, all readers know this instinctively; very few writers know it consciously.
This is, again, a question of structural location: Readers of nonfiction tend to expect the contract statement—that is, the promise of what the whole piece will be about—to arrive as the last sentence of the first paragraph. The first paragraph, which introduces the piece as a whole, is expected to build up enough information so that its last sentence can be confidently read as a promise for what the entire document will tell us.
Gopen’s colleagues Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb performed an experiment that supported this claim. They selected half a dozen essays written by University of Chicago grad students, each about 25 pages long; all had received A’s.
They revised each essay by changing just one sentence—the final sentence of the first paragraph. In the six original essays, that sentence had accurately promised what the whole document was going to be about. For the revised versions, the researchers created new sentences that led a reader’s mind in a completely different direction.
They sent packages of six essays to professors across the country, with each package containing three original essays and three revised versions. The professors were asked to assign grades to all six and include a few sentences of commentary to support their choice.
Across the board, all of the original versions received grades of either A- or A; and all of the revised versions received grades that ranged from B to D. The comments for those lower grades included phrases like “fuzzy thinking” and “poor development of thought.”
Thus, to explain accurately to a reader the focus of the document as a whole, writers should make sure that the final sentence of their opening paragraph is where that contract statement appears.
George Gopen is a professor emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University. He is the 2011 recipient of the Golden Pen Award, a lifetime achievement award, bestowed by the Legal Writing Institute.
