The Reader's Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer - Softcover

Douglas, Yellowlees

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107496500 ISBN 13: 9781107496507

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Have you ever found yourself re-reading the same sentence four or five times and thought "I should get more sleep"? Are you clueless as to why one paragraph just seems to "flow" while you simply can't recall the contents of another? Guess what: you are not alone. Even the best writers fail to grasp why their writing works. The Reader's Brain is the first science-based guide to writing, employing cutting-edge research on how our minds process written language, to ensure your writing can be read quickly, assimilated easily, and recalled precisely - exactly what we need to transform anyone into a highly effective writer. Using the 5Cs - clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence - this book combines irreverent humor with easy-to-follow principles that will make readers perceive your sentences, paragraphs, and documents to be clear, concise, and effective.

About this title

Book Description:

The first comprehensive, science-based approach to writing, The Reader's Brain employs neuroscience, psychology, and psycholinguistics to provide easy-to-follow principles for writing clearly and effectively. The book provides students and professionals from any field with the tools to write highly readable documents - from papers to proposals.

From the Author:

I spent the first half-dozen years I taught undergraduate writing courses, haunted by the conviction that I should refund my students' tuition at the end of each term. What made some sentences read as transparently and easily as glancing through a pane of glass, while others refused to make sense after a third rereading? Why did some writers turn out sentences that telegraphed authority, while others sounded like eight year-olds doing a crappy job on a book report? And, if books on writing had a recognizable methodology behind them, what the hell was it based on?

Wherever I looked, the scanty methodologies available were based on Aristotle's principles for oral arguments--hardly suitable for written arguments in a noisy, literate environment. Other pundits insisted on the importance of the process fledgling writers used for cranking out assignments. However, if you poked around the foundations of each approach, you ended up in the position of the woman who confronted William James after a lecture on cosmology.  His whole theory was ridiculous, she said, insisting the universe rested on the back of a turtle. When James asked her what the turtle stood on, she answered, triumphantly, "It's turtles all the way down!" Books on writing had a "turtles all the way down" problem. Each book was based on the lore handed down by some predecessor, with only anecdotes by battered teachers from the trenches to shore up the advice.

But I came to writing from some thoroughly peculiar directions. I wrote one of the first dissertations on reading and hypertext, which threw me directly into the thick of some of the best research on the way our brains process written language. I spent my doctoral career immersed in cognitive and developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience, extrapolating from the clinical data principles about what made texts hang together. I also spent my earliest years as a professor simultaneously working in advertising for clients that included Cunard, GlaxoSmithKline, ICL, and Abbott Laboratories. My writing had to be readable, accessible, and make readers recall its most important points, from brochures hawking world cruises to white papers on vaccines. As a result, my approach to teaching writing became highly pragmatic. And, when I started teaching clinicians in the College of Medicine at the University of Florida, I needed a science-based methodology to convince skeptical doctors that I actually had something valuable to teach them. At that moment, I connected the utility of the data that had fueled my early research with a science-based approach to teaching writing. In addition to being easy to follow and backed by decades of empirical data, the principles I evolved appealed strongly to scientists and students who crunched numbers and were more comfortable with data than words.

This book is for those of us who (a) wondered what we were supposed to be learning in those required writing courses, (b) always wanted to know why some sentences paragraphs just seemed to work, (c) demand empirical evidence for following directions, (d) need a comprehensive, one-stop guide to writing effectively. Look no further--you've got the answers in your hand.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1107496500
• ISBN 13: 9781107496507
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 225