As a proposal consultant, I edit reams of written content, often making sense of nonsense. I marvel at how people can write in such a complex, obscure and cryptic fashion. Although some authors love to show off their expertise, most are simply suffering from the curse of knowledge – labouring under the assumption that their audience has all the knowledge they have.
When writing a proposal, it is easy to get wrapped up in telling the prospect how marvellous we are and describing all the bells and whistles of our product or service. We completely forget to consider who is on the receiving end and whether what we are saying resonates.
So, let’s unravel the wonderful concept of the curse of knowledge – how it is cast, how to recognise you or your colleagues are suffering, and how to lift and banish it for forever.
Brewing up a potion
In embarking on this section, I openly admit I am not a linguist or any flavour of psychologist. In short, we just need to recognise there is a lot going on in our heads that subconsciously influences how we put pen to paper. Here’s my layperson’s understanding of the complex ingredients of the curse.
The first ingredient is “chunking”. Chunking is one of the methods by which we learn. Think of a chunk as a building block. We assemble our knowledge bank by connecting chunks of information together into larger and more complex chunks - but we sometimes need to disassemble the chunks, so our audience can catch on.
Unfortunately, chunking contributes to complex writing. Imagine a banker describing quantitative easing (something few of us had heard of before the financial crash a decade ago) to another banker. It would be easy because they are at the same ‘chunk level’. Ask the same banker to explain it to a child and the communication level would have to change. Quantitative easing is only comprehensible if you learn and understand the underlying chunks. Kids get buying and selling, and they’ve probably been to a market. From there you can progress to explaining about economies and policies to manage the economy and so no.
The second ingredient is “functional fixity”, the human trait of thinking about things in terms of their function rather than their form. Functionally, a dinner plate is an object from which to eat a meal. Form-wise, it is a flat-ish, hard, round, easily cleanable surface. Functional fixity matters because it leads to abstract and conceptual writing. Take Steven Pinker’s example: “Participants were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation”
(functional) as opposed to “We tested the students in a quiet room”
(form). The latter is concrete and clear.
Finally, we need to throw our four final ingredients into the mix:
- A dash of mindblindness: the inability to see something from someone else's point of view.
- A pinch of egocentricity: disinterest in considering a different perspective.
- A drizzle of hindsight bias: an over-confidence in being able to predict outcomes.
- A splash of false consensus: going along with the crowd regardless of your own opinion.
Once the cauldron is full, stir three times and, voilà, you’ve got yourself a tasty potion for prosaic disaster.
The curse is cast
You will know if you have been cursed if your audience fails to understand and engage with your proposal. This will typically be due to some critical symptoms of your writing: incoherence; acronyms and abbreviations; jargon and gobbledygook; complexity and clutter; and abstraction. Examine your own and your colleagues’ writing carefully to spot if you are afflicted – or better still, get an opinion from someone you trust.
As with many things, admission is the first step to cure. If you have a positive diagnosis, read on.
Lifting the curse
There are some traditional remedies you can use such as “put yourself in your customer’s shoes”
and “imagine the reader on your shoulder”.
Who exactly is the audience? What are they looking for? What do they care about? What is their level of knowledge? Writing with the customer in mind is a good start. And make a working assumption your customer is reasonably intelligent – you don’t want to dumb your writing down to a naïve and condescending level. It’s just they may not understand things to quite the level you do.
With that advice in place, let’s tackle the individual symptoms.
- Incoherence:
Incoherent writing is rambling and disjointed, without logical or meaningful connections. It is typical of someone who knows exactly what they are talking about and simply dumps it onto a page. There’s no flow. There doesn’t need to be – it’s all just obvious, to them.