Meditations and Learnings

Meditations and Learnings

The Curse of Knowledge

Identified by Steven Pinker, the curse of the knowledge can be concisely put:

The more you know, the less clearly you write.

“I think the curse of knowledge is the chief contributor to opaque writing,” Pinker explained. “It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that readers haven’t learned their jargon, don’t seem to know the intermediate steps that seem to them to be too obvious to mention, and can’t visualize a scene currently in the writer’s mind’s eye. And so the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the concrete details — even when writing for professional peers.”