Good Writing is Memorable: Scientific Proof

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Having looked for many years for a way to prove the obvious truth -- that journalists tell it better -- I finally have found, while rambling through the field of education, scientific proof:

About 10 years ago there was a study done -- documented in education journals, in fact, though with little publicity -- about how people best learn history. The study went like this: three pairs of writers, each representing different training, and therefore different styles, taught a history lesson to students in their own way, and the results were calculated. 

The first pair was text linguists, people who are trained in linguistics and psychology and tend to take a structured, formal approach to writing and language. They think about writing, but they don't teach people how to write.

The second pair was college composition teachers. They were trained in English or education. They tended to focus on the process one goes through in writing rather than the product produced. They did teach people to write, using this process approach.

The third pair was magazine editors, from Time magazine, in fact. Their training ranged generally through a liberal arts education, and they learned much of their craft on the job. They wrote for a living, and their job was to get the story told memorably ... and quickly.

These three pairs were asked to rewrite two passages from a U.S. history book to make them more readable, understandable and, most of all, memorable: to aid learning. One of the passages dealt mainly with the end of the Korean War and problems over Formosa; the other dealt with early American involvement in the Vietnam War.

The pairs were then matched with groups of [300] 16- and 17-year-old students, who were asked to judge their work. For each pair, one group read the original passages, and the other read the revisions. They then immediately wrote down everything they remembered from the passages, and the number of ideas they had retained was scored. Although I'm simplifying, I'm assured the methodology was kosher.

Without going through the intricacies of how each revision team worked, the results were stark:

1) Students reading the text linguists' revision recalled 2 percent more than those reading the original versions, a trivial difference.

2) Students reading the composition instructors' revisions recalled 2 percent less than those reading the originals. Wrong direction, and also not significant.

3) Students reading the magazine editors' versions, however, recalled 40 percent more than those reading the originals.

Needless to say, the academics were dismayed, and they wanted another chance. So the study was run again, with the same methodology. The second time, with the benefit of learning what the successful versions had been, there was a little change for the academics, but not much. The basic results were exactly the same.

So while this could be an advertisement for the brilliance of journalists, it is probably better used as a reminder, to us as publishers as much as anyone, of the importance of presentation to substance -- the power of clarity and style.