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What makes one sentence easy to read and another a slog that demands rereading? 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 guide on how to write for your reader. Its chapters introduce the five 'Cs' of writing - clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence - and demonstrate how to use these features to bring your writing to life. This science-based guide also shows you how to improve your writing while 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.
List of contents
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.
About the author
Yellowlees Douglas is the author of The Reader's Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and The Biomedical Writer: What You Need to Succeed in Academic Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2018). For more than twenty-five years, she has taught writing to everyone from professors of medicine to freshmen tackling their first college writing projects.
Summary
Presenting a science-based guide to writing, this practical, how-to book offers principles for writing anything, from an email to a research project. The 5Cs of writing – clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence – enable writers to control precisely how readers will perceive and recall their sentences and paragraphs.
Foreword
A science-based approach to writing virtually anything, ensuring readers perceive your writing as clear, coherent, concise and effective.
