How to communicate clearly

The **curse of knowledge** is a cognitive bias first named by **Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber (1989)** and later popularised by **Steven Pinker** in *The Sense of Style* and **Chip & Dan Heath** in *Made to Stick*: once you know something, you genuinely cannot imagine not knowing it. The result is that experts assume shared context that does not exist, skip steps that feel obvious but aren't, and use shorthand that baffles everyone else. It matters because most communication failures are not failures of effort or intelligence — they are failures of perspective-taking. Identifying the curse is the first step to reversing it.

Ask yourself: if the other person forgets everything else, what is the **one thing** they must retain? **Marylin Carlson Bates** in *Speak Like a CEO* calls this boiling your message down to its core — and **Bill McGowan** in *Pitch Perfect* argues that every failed communication contains too many ideas fighting for attention. Write your central idea in a single declarative sentence before you write anything else. Everything you add should either prove that sentence or give the listener a reason to care about it. If a sentence does neither, cut it.

It means saying the **most important thing first**, not last. The military calls this **BLUF — bottom line up front**. Instead of building up evidence and arriving at a conclusion after three paragraphs, you state the conclusion in the first sentence and then present evidence to support it. **McCormack** in *Brief* and **Jay Sullivan** in *Simply Said* both argue that listeners make their first judgment in the opening seconds; if you haven't delivered value by then, attention drifts. In personal conversations this sounds like: 'I need to cancel Saturday — here's why,' not 'So, a lot has been going on lately…'

Yes — and for a specific reason. **Harold Evans** in *Do I Make Myself Clear?* shows that **active voice** adds urgency and accountability: 'I cancelled the meeting' is cleaner, faster, and harder to misread than 'The meeting was cancelled.' Passive voice creates ambiguity about who did what, which invites misinterpretation and erodes trust. This matters most in high-stakes conversations — disagreements, apologies, requests — where vague authorship is the last thing you want. Defaulting to active voice is not a stylistic preference; it is a precision tool.

**Alan Alda** and **Thich Nhat Hanh** in *The Art of Communicating* share the same underlying principle: match your language to the specific person in front of you, not to an imaginary average listener. Jargon is efficient between experts and opaque to everyone else — the problem is not the jargon itself but using it with someone who doesn't share your vocabulary. Before you speak or write, ask: does this person use this word the same way I do? If you are not sure, use the plain term and briefly define the technical one when precision demands it. You can be rigorous without being inaccessible.

**Classic style**, as described by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner and popularised by **Steven Pinker** in *The Sense of Style*, treats prose as a window onto reality rather than a performance of the writer's effort. You write as if you are showing the reader something true, clearly and directly, as one equal to another — not as a student to a professor, not as a supplicant seeking approval. In practice this means: no throat-clearing ('In this response I will argue…'), no defensive hedges ('It could perhaps be argued…'), and no apologies for saying something plainly. State the thing; trust the reader.

Abstract words like 'important,' 'significant,' or 'challenge' slide off the mind because they give it nothing to grip. **Chip & Dan Heath** in *Made to Stick* show that **concrete, sensory language** — specific numbers, named people, physical descriptions — creates vivid mental images that memory can hook onto. 'A twenty-minute walk' is more memorable than 'a short distance.' 'Three unanswered texts' is more potent than 'some ignored messages.' The principle holds in personal communication too: describing what you saw and heard is almost always clearer and more persuasive than labelling how you felt.

**Steven Pinker** in *The Sense of Style* argues that readers should never have to infer the logical relationship between two sentences — **explicit connectors** do that work for them. 'It was raining. She brought an umbrella.' requires the reader to guess the connection. 'She brought an umbrella because it was raining.' removes all ambiguity. In conversation, connectors signal your reasoning process and prevent misreadings: 'I disagree, _because_…' is far less likely to trigger defensiveness than 'I disagree. Here is the thing.' Use _because_, _however_, _therefore_, _as a result_, and _although_ deliberately and you will halve the number of follow-up questions you receive.

Most relationship conflicts are not disagreements about values — they are **misunderstandings that hardened over time** because one person assumed the other understood what was never said. When you communicate clearly, you reduce the ambient noise of ambiguity that allows small frictions to compound. The connection between precision and closeness is direct: you cannot build intimacy on a foundation of guessed intentions. For the specific words that signal warmth and openness, see our piece on [words that build closeness](/en/blog/words-that-build-closeness) — many of the principles there are the same clarity principles applied to emotional honesty.

Check three things. First, **timing**: even perfectly clear communication lands badly if the other person is stressed, distracted, or emotionally flooded — the message was clear but the channel was closed. Second, **medium**: some messages lose critical tone or context in text and belong in a conversation. Third, **one idea**: if you delivered two or three points, the listener may have absorbed one and missed the others. **McCormack** in *Brief* calls this message bleed — each additional idea you add costs you a fraction of attention on every other idea. When in doubt, follow up with a question: 'What did you take away from that?' is the fastest way to find the gap.