Even experts want clarity

Too many people still insist that sophisticated audiences prefer an “institutional” writing style: impersonal, rendered in passive voice, and lots of technical terms and abstractions.

I’ve long thought that experts actually don’t like this writing style—what I’ll call expert-ese. But that was just a strong hunch, based on feedback from a few real experts and on my rationale that not all people are experts, but all experts are human, and appreciate clear writing. I had no proof.

Until now. Before I get to that, though, let me remind you of the stakes. Despite the lip service it’s given, writing is under-valued. In fact, it’s often just called “content,” like something you put into a bowl and hope it gets eaten.

But a lot of writing, and especially writing aimed at sophisticated readers, is really about ideas. And ideas have the power to persuade, impress, win people over, and make them reconsider their beliefs. If you want readers to engage with your ideas, they need to read beyond the first few paragraphs. And if the writing isn’t clear, as a new study suggests, they won’t.

andrás arató, aka hide the pain harold, facebook.com/painharold/

In the study, a team of researchers from the Universities of Arizona and Utah analyzed 1,640 academic papers published in three peer-reviewed marketing research journals and graded them on a spectrum from less clear (more abstract language, technical terms, and passive voice) to more clear (more concrete language and active voice, fewer or no technical terms).

When a sample of 255 marketing professors were asked to read the first page of several papers in each category, they found the unclear papers harder to understand—despite their marketing expertise.

If these experts have a tough time understanding a paper, the researchers thought, they’re probably less likely to read and engage with it. So they tested this theory by looking at how often papers in each category were cited—a reliable measure of engagement.

Sure enough, papers that were very clear had about 157 more Google Scholar citations than papers with average clarity.

So why do we write unclearly when we’re writing for sophisticated audiences? The researchers suspected “the curse of knowledge”—our tendency to assume our audience knows as much as we do about a given subject.

They tested this too, by having PhD students write two brief papers: one on a project they led, and one on a project led by a colleague. They thought they’d written more clearly about their own projects, but in fact these papers were less clear than the papers on their colleague’s research. Yep, it’s a curse.

I was already convinced that experts are turned off by expert-ese. I’ve also seen time and again—maybe you have, too—that experts are often really unclear when writing about their own area of expertise.

But this is the first academic research I’ve seen that demonstrates both. Sophisticated audiences can handle difficult concepts, but they want those ideas served up clearly. And the more knowledge you have, the more careful you should be about lapsing into expert-ese.

White papers, case studies, and other technical writing aren’t easy to produce. They take time away from portfolio managers and analysts and require more time from marketing teams. They’re a big investment. But they won’t be understood, much less make an impact, if they’re not clearly written.