This lesson is part of the free email course.

In this sixth lesson of Clarity in Academic Writing, we'll find out what is happening when others can't understand us.

We all have a curse of knowledge​

We know everything we want to say. No one else knows as much as we do about our topic.

However, when we try to convey everything we know, we suffer from the curse of knowledge: a cognitive bias where we assume others know as much as we do about a topic.

The curse of knowledge​

The curse of knowledge makes it impossible to put ourselves in our readers' shoes, to imagine what it feels like to be reading our text for the first time and not know what it will say.

We can't imagine what it feels like to not know what we know, so we tend to under-explain and over-estimate the reader's background information.

Everyone, even the most experienced writers, falls into the curse of knowledge trap all the time. We revise and edit drastically to try to remove our curse of knowledge from our text. You will see your curse of knowledge at play in your first drafts. The question is: will you be able to identify it? Most of us will struggle to identify it until someone else points it out to us.

Why do we have this curse of knowledge?​

It comes from the way our brains package information.

In order to save space in our brain, we package groups of concepts together into ever further abstraction in a mental process called chunking:

"As children we see one person hand a cookie to another, and we remember it as an act of giving. One person gives another one a cookie in exchange for a banana; we chunk the two acts of giving together and think of the sequence as trading. Person 1 trades a banana to Person 2 for a shiny piece of metal, because he knows he can trade it to Person 3 for a cookie; we think of it as selling. Lots of people buying and selling make up a market. Activity aggregated over many markets gets chunked into the economy. The economy can now be thought of as an entity which responds to action by central banks; we call that monetary policy. One kind of monetary policy, which involves the central bank buying private assets, is chunked as quantitative easing." (Pinker, A Sense of Style)

​

"As we read and learn, we master a vast number of these abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit which we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. Chunking is an amazing and useful component of higher intelligence, but it gets us in trouble when we write because we assume our readers’ chunks are just like our own. They’re not." (Pinker, A Sense of Style)

Writers cannot understand how readers will process their information because they are not in their readers’ minds. Our minds all contain different chunks. Thus, it is impossible to put ourselves in our readers’ shoes.

This curse of knowledge causes us to create logical gaps in our writing. When we think the information is so obvious that it doesn't need to be explicitly stated, we skip over it, which only introduces ambiguity and confuses the reader.

A logical gap is most often created when we do not put old information into the topic position. We may feel that old to new is "not strictly necessary" because the connection is "so obvious".

Logical gaps can be resolved in two ways:

• apply old to new consistently (see lessons 3, 4, and 5)
• ask for feedback from someone outside of your field

Get feedback​​​

Ask a friend outside of your field to read a short part of your text and mark every place they had to stop reading.

Feedback needs to come from someone who is not familiar with your work. Your supervisor and your close colleagues know much of the information that is in your mind already and they will automatically fill in the gaps rather than pointing them out to you. To make this work, find someone outside of your field and listen to what they have to say.

A reader will stop reading when they are confused about how the parts all fit together. These moments of confusion happen when the connections are not explicit, so the relationship does not appear to be logical to another person's mind: logical gaps.

Now you:​

Ask someone unrelated to your work to read it out loud and record them. It's best if they can "think out loud" while they are reading so you get some insight into their process. Notice every time they stumble, every time they have to go back and re-read, every time they need to stop to process a sentence. These are red flags. ​

Until tomorrow!