What makes one sentence easy to read and another a slog that demands re-reading? Where do you put information you want readers to recall? What about details you need to reveal but want readers to forget? Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, psychology and psycholinguistics, this book provides a practical, how-to guide on how to write for your reader. It introduces the five 'Cs' of writing – clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence – and demonstrates how to use these to bring your writing to life. It also shows you how to do all this whilst also making the writing process speedier and more efficient. Brimming with examples, this humorous, surprisingly irreverent book provides writers with the tools they need to master everything from an email to a research project. If you believe good writers are simply born that way, Writing for the Reader's Brain will change your mind – and, quite possibly, your life.
1. Writing is a system, not an art; Getting writing done: stages in the writing process; 2. Clarity: choosing words and building sentences; Getting writing done: what you read influences how you write; 3. Continuity: tying sentences together; Getting writing done: writing collaboratively; 4. Coherence: structuring paragraphs and texts; Getting writing done: standard English is a dialect; 5. Concision: maximizing efficiency, minimizing words; Getting writing done: writing from the top down; 6. Cadence: making sentences sophisticated and rhythmic; Getting writing done: harness the power of paradox; Supplement: grammar and punctuation made (relatively) painless; Answers to test your chops; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
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