The Science of Strong Business Writing

by Bill Birchard
Strong writing skills are essential for anyone in business. You need them to effectively
communicate with colleagues, employees, and bosses and to sell any ideas, products, or
services you’re offering.
Many people, especially in the corporate world, think good writing is an art—and that
those who do it well have an innate talent they’ve nurtured through experience, intuition,
and a habit of reading often and widely. But every day we’re learning more about the
science of good writing. Advances in neurobiology and psychology show, with data and in
images, exactly how the brain responds to words, phrases, and stories. And the criteria for
making better writing choices are more objective than you might think.

Good writing gets the reader’s dop mine flowing in the area of the brain known as the
reward circuit. Great writing releases opioids that turn on reward hot spots. Just like good
food, a soot ing bath, or an enveloping hug, well executed prose makes us feel pleasure,
which makes us want to keep reading.

Most of the rules you learned in school—“Show, don’t tell” or “Use the active voice”—still
hold. But the reasons they do are now clearer. Scientists using MRI and PET machines can
literally see how reward regions clustered in the mi brain light up when people read
certain types of writing or hear it spoken aloud. Each word, phrase, or idea acts as a
stimulus, causing the brain to instantly answer a stream of questions: Does this promise
value? Will I like it? Can I learn from it?

Kent Berridge, a pioneering University of Michigan psychologist and neuroscientist, notes

that researchers originally believed that the reward circuit largely handled sensory cues.
But, he explains, “it’s become clear in the past 50 years from neuroimaging studies that all
kinds of social and cultural rewards can also activate this system.”

Whether it’s a succinct declarative statement in an email or a complex argument in a

report, your own writing has the potential to light up the neural circuitry of your readers’
brains. (The same is true if you read the words to an audience.) The magic happens when
prose has one or more of these characteristics: It’s simple, specific, surprising, stirring,
seductive, smart, social, or story driven. In my work as an author and a writing coach for
businesspeople, I’ve found those eight S’s to be hallmarks of the best writing. And scientific
evidence backs up their power.

Simplicity

“Keep it simple.” This classic piece of writing advice stands on the most basic neuroscience
research. Simplicity increases what scientists call the brain’s “processing fluency.” Short
sentences, familiar words, and clean syntax ensure that the reader doesn’t have to exert too
much brainpower to understand your meaning.
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 By contrast, studies have shown that sentences with clauses nested in the middle take
longer to read and cause more comprehension mistakes. Ditto for most sentences in the
passive voice. If you write “Profits are loved by investors,” for example, instead of
“Investors love profits,” you’re switching the standard positions of the verb and the direct
object. That can cut comprehension accuracy by 10% and take a tenth of a second longer to
read.

Tsuyoshi Okuhara, of the University of Tokyo, teamed with colleagues to ask 400 people
aged 40 to 69 to read about how to exercise for better health. Half the group got long-
winded, somewhat technical material. The other half got an easy-to-read edit of the same
content. The group reading the simple version—with shorter words and sentences, among
other things—scored higher on self-efficacy: They expressed more confidence in
succeeding.

Even more noteworthy: Humans learn from experience that simpler explanations are not
always right, but they usually are. Andrey Kolmogorov, a Russian mathematician, proved
decades ago that people infer that simpler patterns yield better predictions, explanations,
and decisions. That means you’re more persuasive when you reduce overdressed ideas to
their naked state.

Cutting extraneous words and using the active voice are two ways to keep it simple.
Another tactic is to drill down to what’s really salient and scrap tangential details. Let’s say
you have researched crossover markets and are recommending options in a memo to
senior leaders. Instead of sharing every pro and con for each market—that is, taking the
exhaustive approach—maybe pitch just the top two prospects and identify their principal
pluses and minuses.
Speci city

Specifics awaken a swath of brain circuits. Think of “pelican” versus “bird.” Or “wipe”
versus “clean.” In one study, the more-specific words in those pairs activated more
neurons in the visual and motor-strip parts of the brain than did the general ones, which
means they caused the brain to process meaning more robustly.

Years ago scientists thought our brains decoded words as symbols. Now we understand
that our neurons actually “embody” what the words mean: When we hear more-specific
ones, we “taste,” “feel,” and “see” traces of the real thing.

Remarkably, the simulation may extend to our muscles too. When a team led by an Italian
researcher, Marco Tettamanti, asked people to listen to sentences related to the mouth,
hand, and leg—“I bite an apple”; “I grasp a knife”; “I kick the ball”—the brain regions for
moving their jaws, hands, and legs fired.

Using more-vivid, palpable language will reward your readers. In a recent letter to
shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t say, “We’re facing strong competition.”
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Channeling Tettamanti’s research, he wrote, “Third-party sellers are kicking our first-party
butt. Badly.”

Another specificity tactic is to give readers a memorable shorthand phrase to help them
retain your message. Malcolm Gladwell coined “the tipping point.” Management gurus W.
Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne came up with “blue ocean strategy”; essayist Nassim
Nicholas Taleb, “black swan event.”

Surprise

Our brains are wired to make nonstop predictions, including guessing the next word in
every line of text. If your writing confirms the readers’ guess, that’s OK, though possibly a
yawner. Surprise can make your message stick, helping readers learn and retain
information.

Jean-Louis Dessalles, a researcher in artificial intelligence and cognitive science at

Télécom Paris, conducted an experiment that demonstrated people’s affinity for the
unexpected. He asked participants to read short, unfinished narratives and consider
different possible endings for each. For example, one story read: “Two weeks after my car
had been stolen, the police informed me that a car that might be mine was for sale on the
internet….The phone number had been identified. It was the mobile phone number of….”
The choices were (a) “my office colleague,” (b) “a colleague of my brother’s,” or (c)
“someone in my neighborhood.” For 17 of 18 stories, the vast majority of people preferred
the most unexpected ending (in this example, the work colleague). They didn’t want a story
that fulfilled their predictions.

So reward your readers with novelty. Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, of the
Wharton School, saw the impact of surprising content when they examined nearly 7,000
articles that appeared online in the New York Times. They found that those rated as
surprising were 14% more likely to be on the newspaper’s “most-emailed” list.

Readers appreciate unusual wordplay, too. A good example is John McPhee’s

characterization of World War II as a “technological piñata.” Or consider how a Texas-
based conglomerate described itself in its 2016 shareholder letter: “Think of Biglari
Holdings as a museum of businesses. Our preference is to collect masterpieces.”

Stirring Language

You may think you’re more likely to persuade with logic, but no. Our brains process the
emotional connotations of a word within 200 milliseconds of reading it—much faster than
we understand its meaning. So when we read emotionally charged material, we reflexively
react with feelings—fear, joy, awe, disgust, and so forth—because our brains have been
trained since hunter-gatherer times to respond that way. Reason follows. We then combine
the immediate feeling and subsequent thought to create meaning.
How sensitive are we to emotion? Experiments show that when people hear a list of words,
they often miss a few as a result of “attentional blinks” caused by limits in our brain
processing power. But we don’t miss the emotionally significant words. With those there
are no blinks.

When we read emotionally charged material, we reflexively react with feelings

—fear, joy, awe, disgust, and so forth. Reason follows.
So when you write your next memo, consider injecting words that package feeling and
thought together. Instead of saying “challenge the competition,” you might use “outwit
rivals.” In lieu of “promote innovation,” try “prize ingenuity.” Metaphor often works even
better. Canadian researchers Andrea Bowes and Albert Katz tested relatively bland phrases
like “What a very good idea!” and “Be careful what you say” against more-evocative
expressions like “What a gem of an idea!” and “Watch your back.” Readers reacted more
strongly to the latter.

Just a small touch can drive the neural circuits for emotion. So before you start composing,
get your feelings straight, along with your facts. Zeal for your message will show through.
And if you express your emotion, readers will feel it.

Seductiveness

As humans, we’re wired to savor a ti ipation. One famous study showed that people are
often happier planning a vacation than they are after taking one. Scientists call the reward
“anticipatory utility.” You can build up the same sort of excitement when you structure
your writing. In experiments using poetry, researchers found that readers’ reward circuitry
reached peak firing several seconds before the high points of emphatic lines and stanzas.
Brain images show preemptive spikes of pleasure even in readers with no previous interest
in poetry.

You can generate a similar reaction by winding up people’s curiosity for what’s to come.
Steve Jobs did this in his famous “How to Live Before You Die” commencement address to
Stanford University’s class of 2005. “I never graduated from college,” he began. “Truth be
told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you
three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.” Are you on the edge of
your seat to hear what the three stories are?

So start a report with a question. Pose your customer problem as a conundrum. Position
your product development work as solving a mystery. Put readers in a state of uncertainty
so that you can then lead them to something better.

Smart Thinking

Making people feel smart—giving them an “aha” moment—is another way to please
readers. To show how these sudden “pops” of insight activate the brain, researchers have
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asked people to read three words (for example, “house,” “bark,” and “apple”) and then
identify a fourth word that relates to all three, while MRI machines and EEGs record their
brain activity. When the study participants arrive at a solution (“tree”), brain regions near
the right temple light up, and so do parts of the reward circuit in the prefrontal cortex and
midbrain. The readers’ delight is visible. Psychological research also reveals how people
feel after such moments: at ease, certain, and—most of all—happy.

How can you write to create an aha moment for your readers? One way is to draw fresh
distinctions. Ginni Rometty, formerly IBM’s CEO, offered one with this description of the
future: “It will not be a world of man versus machine; it will be a world of man plus
machine.”

Another strategy is to phrase a pragmatic message so that it also evokes a perennial,

universal truth. The late Max De Pree, founder and CEO of the office furniture company
Herman Miller, had a knack for speaking to employees this way. In Leadership Is an
Art he wrote: “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank
you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor.” That’s wisdom
not just for business managers but for parents, teachers, coaches—anyone in a guiding
role.

Social Content

Our brains are wired to crave human connection—even in what we read. Consider a study
of readers’ responses to different kinds of literary excerpts: some with vivid descriptions of
people or their thoughts, and others without such a focus. The passages that included
people activated the areas of participants’ brains that interpret social signals, which in turn
triggered their reward circuits.

We don’t want just to read about people, though—we want to understand what they’re
thinking as quickly as possible. A study led by Frank Van Overwalle, a social neuroscientist
at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, found that readers infer the goals of people they’re reading
about in under 350 milliseconds, and discern their character traits within 650
milliseconds.

One way to help readers connect with you and your writing is to reveal more traces of
yourself in it. Think voice, worl view, vocabulary, wit, syntax, poetic rhythm, sensibilities.
Take the folksy—and effective—speeches and letters of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren
Buffett. His bon mots include “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone
planted a tree a long time ago,” “It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s
been swimming naked,” and “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

Remember also to include the human angle in any topic you’re discussing. When you want
to make a point about a supply-chain hiccup, for example, don’t frame the problem as a
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“trucking disconnect.” Write instead about mixed signals between the driver and
dispatcher.

Another simple trick to engage readers is to use the second person (“you”), as I’ve done
throughout this piece. This can be particularly helpful when you’re explaining technical or
complicated material. For example, psychologist Richard Mayer and colleagues at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, ran experiments with two versions of an online
presentation on the respiratory system. Each included 100 words of spoken text paired
with simple animations. But one version used the impersonal third person (“During
inhaling, the diaphragm moves down, creating more space for the lungs…”), while the
other was more personal (“your diaphragm” and “your lungs…”). People who listened to
the latter scored significantly higher than their counterparts on a test that measured what
they had learned.

Storytelling

Few things beat a good anecdote. Stories, even fragments of them, captivate extensive
portions of readers’ brains in part because they combine many of the elements I’ve
described already.

Research by Uri Hasson at Princeton reveals the neural effect of an engaging tale.
Functional MRI scans show that when a story begins, listeners’ brains immediately begin
glowing in a specific pattern. What’s more, that grid reflects the stor teller’s exactly. Other
research shows that, at the same time, midbrain regions of the reward circuit come to life.

Experiments by behavioral scientists at the University of Florida produced similar results.

Brain images showed heightened activity in reward regions among people who read 12-
second narratives that prompted pleasant images. (A sample narrative: “It’s the last few
minutes of the big game and it’s close. The crowd explodes in a deafening roar. You jump
up, cheering. Your team has come from behind to win.”)

When you incorporate stories into your communications, big payoffs can result. Consider
research that Melissa Lynne Murphy did at the University of Texas, looking at business
crowdfunding campaigns. She found that study participants formed more-favorable
impressions of the pitches that had richer narratives, giving them higher marks for
entrepreneur credibility and business legitimacy. Study participants also expressed more
willingness to invest in the projects and share info mation about them. The implication:
No stories, no great funding success.
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Bill Birchard is a business author and book-writing coach. His Writing for Impact: 8
Secrets from Science That Will Fire Up Your Reader’s Brain will be published by
HarperCollins Leadership in April 2023. His previous books include Merchants of Virtue,
Stairway to Earth, Nature’s Keepers, Counting What Counts, and others. For more
writing tactics, see his website.