3 Reasons to Write Plainly

My friend showed me an essay he wrote for his college application, and I thought it sounded like flowery BS. So this is what I emailed him.

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You should write more plainly for three reasons:

1. People have bad reading comprehension. People read things and "get the gist" - but it's a pathetically vague gist.
   
   (Readers have no idea how bad their understanding is. They'll think they've understood something they've read, but fail to answer a simple test question about it.)
   
   
2. Readers get bored easily. The more bored they get, the more they skim, and the less they understand.
   
   If you want to be understood, don't wrap your message in a bouquet of flowery words. They won't unwrap it, they'll ignore it.
   
   
3. It's already hard enough to get people to understand your concepts.
   
   Only a few things are easy for everyone to think about: Concrete statements about people, animals, food, war, sex, morality, personality, games, and landscapes. Almost every other concrete thing, and almost every abstract thing, is hard to think about.
   
   So when you're writing about easy things like sex, you can say fancy things like "I am the east, and Juliet is the sun."
   
   And when you're writing about hard things like the theory of relativity, you have to say plain things like "Mass dents spacetime the way a bowling ball would dent a bedsheet."
   
   Most things you'll write about are like the theory of relativity, and not like sex.

So don't write a hard slab of beef jerky that your readers have to chomp on with all their might.

Process your ideas into Gerber weenies.