Why the way we write is such a touchy topic

Telling someone they need help with their writing rarely lands well.

You may be right. They may even agree with you. But they’ll still probably feel at least a little wounded if you point it out.

The trouble is that, deep down, we think writing is something we should be able to just do – like dressing ourselves or walking.

Yet when we don’t get the response to a message or document that we were hoping for, the problem often lies with how we wrote it.

Complex skill

Writing is a far more complex skill than most of us realise.

Unlike speaking and listening, reading and writing are not natural processes.

We’re born with the ability to communicate using our voices – just ask any new parent how hard it is to ignore their crying baby.

And our brains come pre-configured to learn our first language simply by listening to other people speak. It’s even how we pick up the fundamentals of grammar.

(Like when toddlers say ‘thinked’ or ‘seed’ instead of ‘thought’ or ‘saw’. They’ve worked out that adding ‘d’ on to a verb is how we usually form the past tense in English.)

Reading, however, isn’t quite so simple.

Rewiring the brain

I could stare at Hebrew or Arabic for years and still not have the faintest idea what it meant. I’d only be able to understand it if someone carefully explained it to me.

In fact, learning to read and write even in our first language is incredibly complex. It involves completely rewiring the brain.

It means joining together neurological structures that we’d naturally use for other things, like connecting our visual system to our hearing system. (We often ‘hear’ words in our heads before we write them.)

Little wonder then that it takes 10 to 12 years to do it.

But reading is still an imperfect process, even in adults. So there’s usually a higher risk of misunderstandings when we’re writing to someone than if we’re speaking to them.

And that’s if they even read it at all – written communications are far easier to ignore than people who are speaking to us directly.

Rely on writing

This is no trivial issue.

In the Digital Age, most communication relies on writing, even if we don’t think of it that way. Live chat, texting and direct messaging all involve typing words on a screen – writing, in other words.

Internal comms systems such as Teams Chat or Slack are mainly text-based too. And most organisations rely heavily on written reports and proposals when making key decisions.

Improve everything

In fact, often the only way to influence anyone above your immediate line manager is to write a document that they’ll (hopefully) read.

So the more you think about it, the more you see that it’s writing all the way. It’s hard to think of another professional skill that’s so central to everything we do.

Where to start

Most writing can be improved if you know how.

And there are lots of ways to do it, as we’ve seen over the last few weeks. They range from removing pointlessly complex words and phrases (which I call Documentese) to changing the way we describe data.

All are based on how our brains really process written information. (And we can handle a lot less of that than we realise, as I explained recently.)

You’ll also find a full range of (free) practical guides to writing all types of document on our Knowledge Hub.

Image credit: Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock

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Author: Rob Ashton

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Rob Ashton is the founder of Emphasis and posts mainly about writing and the brain – a topic he's been researching for seven years. You can read more of his work in Writing Matters – our weekly bulletin of career-building writing advice backed by science.