This article comes from the public number:People and God (ID: tongyipaocha), author: God people were excited, title figure from: vision China
First, the curse of knowledge
There is a word called “The Curse of Knowledge”, the more things you know, the weaker your expression.
Think about it. Have you ever encountered a situation where a friend asks you a professional question, and you said a lot of excitement, but found that the friend listened more and more confused; you read a A wonderful movie, but when it comes to telling a friend, you can’t tell where it is.
So now you are more and more like to lose a link for your friends to understand?
But you always have to report your professional affairs to the leader, if you encounter a non-professional leader? Do you always have to explain your professional views to colleagues?
More importantly, most professionals are now expanding their influence in the industry through self-media. The self-media is a world with a lot of information. Most people lack the patience to read. You should not only let others understand, but also let others “understand” in seconds.
Compared with more than a decade ago, the role of writing has been improved unprecedentedly. Even short videos test the scripting skills.
So we must be clear about why there is a “curse of knowledge.”
Second, how to use writing as your competitive “recharge”?
A lot of people are confused. When I think about these questions, my brain is very clear, but why are there a lot of “anti-human” expressions as soon as they are expressed?
This is because the structure of thinking is very different from the structure of expression. People without training in writing are greatly influenced by textbooks, which are the standard structure of thinking.
A dozen years ago, I wrote an article about the bank’s illegal issuance of salary cards. In the impression, it started like this:
In recent years, there has been a “bank card war” among banks. Various bank cards issued in the name of salary cards actually have no salary, and many of them are even “fake cards” to complete tasks… …
What I changed later in this article, I forgot, except for the modification at the beginning, I still remember:
Bank card! More and more bank cards. The trouble for ordinary people is that wallets cannot hold so many cards, and the trouble for banks is that more and more bank cards have not been used since the day they were issued. All of this stems from the “bank card war.”
Compare these two beginnings. The original beginning is the “standard paradigm” of professional articles. It stands for “the article always has a beginning, everyone writes it like this”; and the beginning , Is the classic way of mass communication, it is saying “what does this article have to do with you”.
Everyone hates rigid textbooks, but most of our professional knowledge comes from books, the most important of which is textbooks, and our writing has also been influenced by its subtle influence-we finally lived into our original Nasty look.
Breaking the curse of knowledge, we must comprehensively remove the adverse effects of textbooks on our writing from “phrases, sentence patterns, and paragraphs.”
Three, the first curse of knowledge: professional noun combination
When writing professional articles, most people know to avoid stacking professional terminology with laymen, and use such terms as “financial disintermediation”, “liquidity trap” and “infinite forensic” without explanation, which is simply a reminder. Anyone who is not busy will be exempted.
But this is not enough. Many words that everyone understands become strange when they are put together. For example, this sentence:
“Reflected by the ticket What’s more, the stated payer’s liabilities to the bearer: before the bill is not discounted, the debt to the customer who holds the bill; after discounting, it is the debt to the bank that purchased the bill.”
Except for “discount”, “bearer”, “payer” and “liability” are not difficultUnderstand the terms, but they are combined together, and an undergraduate in finance also needs to read it several times to really understand.
Instead, it is like “the central bank’s digital currency is the electronicization of cash and there is no interest, so it will not trigger financial disintermediation.” Although the term “financial disintermediation” is used unexplained, it does not hinder everyone. Understand what the author means.
So, what really confuses the reader is not the professional terminology, but the new relationship between words.
Analyze the phrase “the bill reflects the payer’s liability to the bearer”, and use the word “liability” to describe the relationship between the payer and the bearer. Not only the general readers can’t understand it, even if it has an economic foundation. Readers understand it, but also half a beat.
Textbooks like to write this, just to make you read slowly and understand more deeply.
One of the techniques to break the “curse of knowledge”: Not only to avoid the use of professional terminology, but also to avoid the combination of professional logic words, not only to let others understand, but also to let others “understand” in seconds.
So the best way to express it is to describe professional relationships with common logic in life, such as this sentence, it is better to change to:
One ticket “Important”, the bearer is the creditor, and the “payer” on the bill is responsible for repayment. Bill discounting means that the bearer “sells” this “debt” to the bank, and the bank becomes a creditor.
After the change, these terms are still used, but the relationship between the terms is the daily life relationship that everyone can easily understand.
Fourth, the second curse of knowledge: long sentences with complex structure
Look at the following sentence, it took you a few seconds to understand:
The consumer price index is a price index that comprehensively reflects the trend and extent of the price changes of consumer goods and services for residents in a certain period of time.
The above sentence is a classically defined sentence pattern in textbooks, which can be abbreviated to “the consumer price index is the price index of XXX”, which is very rigorous in the textbook, but if it is taken out to communicate with ordinary people , The effect is very poor.
The phrase “trend and degree” is not intuitive. You need to think about it to understand its meaning. It is better to replace it with the vernacular “It is expensive or cheap, how much is expensive or how much cheaper.”
The above is still a minor problem. What’s more fatal is that in the original sentence, there is a long list of complex attributions in front of the central word “price index” that “comprehensively reflect the trend of price changes of consumer goods and service items of residents in a certain period Degree”, most people have to read it several times to understand.
How can I change it so that I can understand it quickly? Think about what we usually say:
“Xiao Zhang, Please help me get the design data. On my desk, it should be on the left side of the computer. If not, it is on the third floor of the data shelf, counting from top to bottom…”
I’m afraid we won’t say-“Xiao Zhang, please help me get the pile of design materials on the left side of the computer on the desk or the third level from the top to the bottom of the shelf…”
The reason is that natural language is linear, and only one opportunity to understand and remember can understand the latter before understanding the former.
The former daily dialogue narrative method, first talk about the most important event “take design information”, Xiao Zhang first formed a cognitive framework in his mind, naturally a question “where is the information”, and then describe the information in detail When it was put, Xiao Zhang remembered it again.
In the latter way of narrative, the order in which Zhang obtains information is:
“Let me take the computer?”
“Let me take the information rack?”
“Oh, it turned out to be design materials.”
“Slow down,