Working on these books with clever co-authors has been a wonderful learning journey, but the work of improving your own writing is never done. One way to make your writing more engaging is to understand how readers\u2019 brains process text.<\/p>\n
Our brain has all kinds of \u2018hacks\u2019 to speed the process of reading. Think about it for a moment: if we did a mental \u2018look up\u2019 of the meaning of each word as we see it on the page, it would take a month to read a couple of pages. When we read, our brains look for recognisable \u2018slabs\u2019 of text; certain arrangements of words we\u2019ve come to expect to see after decades of reading English. Researchers call these slabs \u2018schemas\u2019.<\/p>\n
A schema is a plan or model; in text, schemas are recurring patterns of words. For instance, adjectives in English need to appear in this order: opinion \u2013 size \u2013 age \u2013 shape \u2013 colour \u2013 origin \u2013 material \u2013 purpose \u2013 Noun. Muck this order up even slightly and your reader is instantly confused. Here\u2019s an example from Mark Forsythe\u2019s\u00a0Elements of Eloquence<\/a>:\u00a0\u00a0A lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife\u00a0<\/i>makes some sense, but\u00a0A lovely little old rectangular French silver green whittling knife\u00a0<\/i>does not.<\/p>\n Why? No one really knows! Brains hey? Weird.<\/p>\n The most important English language schema is\u00a0subject-verb-object<\/strong>. A simple example of subject-verb-object formation is:<\/p>\n Darwin studied finches.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n ICYMI: Darwin (subject \u2013 the doer) studied (verb) finches (object that was acted on).<\/p>\n The subject-verb-object form works because it feeds the brain information about action in the world. In the sentence\u00a0Darwin studied finches<\/em>, Darwin is doing the studying and the finches are the ones being studied. If you jumble it slightly and wrote Studied Darwin finches<\/em>, your brain is not sure what action is happening and must slow down to process it, word by word. To our reading brain, this is like driving along at 100kms an hour down the word highway and suddenly having to jam on the breaks to avoid a hole in the road.<\/p>\n Luckily, brains are flexible. They will usually distill the meaning from a sentence, even if you muck up the subject-verb-object order. In fact, sentences that deliberately muck it up can even be fun, which is why when Yoda says\u00a0Powerful you have become; the dark side I sense in you<\/em>, he comes across as endearing, rather than incomprehensible:<\/p>\n A colleague of my husband, Adam Ratcliff, calls getting the subject-verb-object consistently mixed up \u2018Yodanating\u2019. Of course, the no-fun Darth Vadar wouldn\u2019t be caught dead Yodanating:<\/p>\n Your brain is hooked on subject-verb-object and will look for it, even when it\u2019s only suggested, which (side note) is why certain road signs in Canberra are so irritating: If a sentence makes you slow down to try and understand what is happening,\u00a0 you have probably stuffed up the subject-verb-object order. I pride myself on being a good writer, but my published papers are full of sentences that break this basic subject-verb-object rule. Consider this clunker, from a paper I published with colleagues a couple of years ago:<\/p>\n The growing awareness of a range of possible career destinations for Ph.D. graduates has led to widespread questioning of the \u2018traditional\u2019 model of the Ph.D.<\/em><\/p>\n Can you see the subject-verb-object schema anywhere? Here, I\u2019ll colour code it for you so it\u2019s easier to see. I\u2019ll use orange for subjects (usually people, but not always)<\/span>, green for verbs (\u2018doing words\u2019)<\/span> and blue for objects (usually things or concepts, but sometimes people)<\/span>:<\/p>\n The growing awareness<\/span> of a range of possible career destinations<\/span> for Ph.D graduates<\/span> has led to<\/span> widespread questioning<\/span> of the \u2018traditional\u2019\u00a0 Ph.D curriculum<\/span>.<\/em><\/p>\n The sentence is so confusing I am not sure I got the colour coding right. \u2018Ph.D Graduates\u2019 could have been orange I suppose? But the Ph.D graduates are not doing anything \u2013 if there\u2019s action in this sentence it\u2019s the questioning. But who is doing the \u2018questioning\u2019? We are left to guess.<\/p>\n The fix for clunky sentences like this is easy: just make it clear who is doing what to whom. Let\u2019s populate the sentence with some proper \u2018doers\u2019 of actions and see what happens:<\/p>\n Research<\/span> suggests<\/span> PhD graduates<\/span> have a broad range of possible career destinations, which has led scholars<\/span> to question<\/span> the utility of the \u2018traditional\u2019 PhD curriculum.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Much better. The reworked sentence even has two subject-verb-object clusters: our brain feels like it\u2019s at an action movie!<\/p>\n Sentences with complete schemas are more compelling because our brains don\u2019t have to struggle to distill meaning. Your brain likes to see the subject-verb-object cluster close to the start of a sentence so that it can satisfy itself about what action is taking place before it gets to the clarifying details.<\/p>\n In our re-worked sentence above, there\u2019s a subject-verb-object cluster right at the start, with a bit of explanation and clarification right after it. Here, I\u2019ll highlight the extra stuff in pink:<\/p>\n Research suggests PhD graduates have a broad range of possible career destinations<\/span>, which has led scholars to question the utility of the \u2018traditional\u2019 PhD curriculum.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n My friend Paul Magee<\/a> recently pointed out that linguists call this kind of structure a \u2018right branching sentence\u2019. During a recent nerdy lunch, where we planned a podcast series about brains and writing (stay tuned!), he pointed out that brains prefer right branching sentences because they occur frequently in speech. Speech-like sentences are pleasing to the brain for a very special reason. When we read, our brain uses the sound processing circuits in the brain to generate an \u2018inner narrator\u2019. This is why we talk about a \u2018writer\u2019s voice\u2019: from our brain\u2019s point of view, when we read we are listening, not looking.<\/p>\n The opposite of a right branching sentence is a left branching one, where the clarification or modification appears before the action in the subject-verb-object cluster. Peter Elbow, in his book \u2018Venacular Eloquence\u2019 points out that left branching sentences are hard on the brain because they force it to do more work. Take this sentence, again from one of my papers (oh the shame!), which has a whole lot of explanation before we get to the subject-verb object cluster. I\u2019ve highlighed the left branching explanation bits in pink:<\/p>\n When consulting with employers about the range of skills a PhD graduate should have on completion in order to be employable<\/span>, academic managers<\/span> typically take<\/span> a round table approach.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n This left branching sentence forces the brain to \u2018hold\u2019 a lot of information about what the academic managers are doing before applying it to the action. It\u2019s the kind of sentence that forces the reader to go back to the start after they have finished in order to really understand what is going on. Rather than making your reader jam on the breaks, you are forcing them to go all the way around the roundabout again before exiting.<\/p>\n I see this kind of left branching sentence construction ALL THE TIME in student writing, and in academic writing more generally. I think researchers are particularly prone to excessive left branching because our brain is so loaded with detail when we write. Scholarly writing is also defensive: we feel the need to qualify everything we say before we say it, just to make sure the reader knows we have done our due diligence.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to avoid a left branching sentence, but you will get away with it if you make the left branch quite short. This enables readers\u2019 brains to more easily \u2018hold\u2019 the information you want to apply to the action, like so:<\/p>\n When consulting with employers,<\/span> academic managers<\/span><\/span><\/span> typically <\/span><\/span>take<\/span><\/span><\/span> a <\/span><\/span>round table approach.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n I hope this little detour into brain science has given you some tools to make more brain-ready sentences!<\/p>\n Comments are still off, but you can talk to me on Twitter by tagging me with @thesiswhisperer. I might be blogging less, but I am using the time to pursue my podcast hobby: the first On The Reg podcast <\/a>for 2021 is now up for your listening pleasure!<\/p>\n In solidarity and grammar nerdery,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/YODA.png\")
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