Writing is a difficult task for most professional workers. This the scope of this article, I mean professional writing such as a report, presentation, plan, email or even in digital communication tools such as Slack… not creative writing or short tweets & status.
Writing is the way to present your thinking in written form.
Here is a twist, writing what you think is not difficult. Just write literally what is on your mind words by words. The difficulty is how to write to make readers understand what you think. You got to think about how to write your thinking. I have met a lot of smart, excellent people but terrible in writing what they think.
Thinking about a problem and thinking about how to write down your thoughts are two VERY different problems
Remember that what you have in your mind is not what the readers have in their mind, so they don’t have the same background and logic linking to understand a problem like you. So to make people get what you think, you need to structure your thinking (ideas) into a way that readers’ mind works. And of course, to do that, you need to understand how one’s mind works. In this article, I will discuss some very basic rules that I find useful for my writing.
- People can’t remember more than 7(+-2) items at once
A well-recognized theory call Miller’s law says that 7 plus/minus 2 piece of information is the limits for humans to process at one time. Some people can remember up to 9 items, some are just fine with 5. You can read more about that law, here.
Knowing that working memory capacity of humans, you should limit the number of items presented to readers to 7 plus/minus 2. 3 items at one time is well-known as the ideal number and of course, 1 is the best.
To limit your number of items presented, you need to master a skill called “grouping”! Grouping lets you group similar ideas to a bigger group, which helps you reduce the number of individual items. It helps your readers. They can remember all big grouping ideas first and smaller ideas in each grouping later.
2. People tend to impose orders out of chaos
Gestalt is another well- recognized theory of perception, which … is quite complex to understand. The main idea says that “the whole is something else than the sum of its parts” — Kurt Koffka. You can read more here.
It means that humans tend to perceive whole events rather than a series of individual ones. Another way to explain this theory that I find easy to understand is “humans tend to impose orders out of chaos”. So how this theory helps you in writing?
Because when reading, readers tend to perceive whole messages rather than a series of individual ideas. To do that, they will look for and impose the relationship (order) between the ideas. So what you have to care when writing is not only the individual ideas but also the relationship between them.
You must ensure that the readers understand and follow accurately the relationship you create for your ideas in your writing.
If you fail to do that, your readers may impose his own orders for your writing, which leads to
- he doesn’t see the relationship. In results, he can’t get the whole message you want him to understand. Even he understands individual ideas, he still can’t get what you mean with those ideas
- he sees the wrong relationship. Bad enough, right?
- he takes longer to see the true relationship. Okay, but he will likely to be frustrated.
Now you can see that if the 1st rule tells you to group ideas to 7 (+-2) so that readers can take easily, then 2nd rule asks you to ensure a clear relationship among your grouped ideas so that readers can take it accurately.
3. People are emotional and wordings are powerful
As people say, words are swords. And humans, in nature, are emotional.
Your choice of wording may affect your readers a lot. Depending on the readers and the context, you should carefully choose the words for your writing.
To make it easy, let’s imagine your boss asks your opinion about his new plan,
– This is terrible!
– I think there is some room for improvement.
See the difference?
So above are 3 basic principles that I personally find very useful when writing. You can see that this kind of writing is a way of expressing thinking. But over the years, I find out that writing is very useful in practicing thinking structurally.
You think about a problem, then writing your thoughts down forces you to arrange your thinking. As a result, you can see what is the gap in your logic and (hopefully) know how to fill it.
Happy writing!
San 
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