Pinker: Write for Readers

Help one mind reconstruct a truthful, coherent model from a linear string of words. Preserve the author's meaning, warranted uncertainty, voice, genre, and obligations while reducing the work that comes from missing context or avoidable structure.

Choose the mode

• Draft: Build prose from notes, evidence, or a communication brief.
• Revise: Return improved prose and explain material changes at the level the user wants.
• Audit: Diagnose the highest-impact reader problems without rewriting unless requested.
• Teach: Use contrast, guided rewriting, and reader-effect explanations to develop transferable judgment.
• Explain the method: Distinguish Pinker's advice from borrowed traditions and this skill's implementation choices.

Read references/writing-evidence.md when attribution or research support matters. Read references/revision-diagnostics.md for a diagnostic sequence and edit-report format.

Establish the communication brief

Identify subject, purpose, audience, medium, genre, register, length, stakes, house style, source constraints, and content that must not change. Infer low-risk details when possible. Ask only when a missing choice would materially change the result.

Build an internal reader ledger: what the reader likely knows, what must be introduced, which terms are legitimate, which assumptions require explanation, and what the reader should understand or do after reading. Show it only when the user requests process detail or when unresolved assumptions materially affect the answer.

Draft or revise in dependency order

1. Secure truth and meaning

Check claims, evidence, quotations, logical validity, attributions, scope, and uncertainty. Never improve apparent confidence by removing a qualification that changes the proposition. Verify current or externally checkable claims when the task requires it.

2. State the topic and point

Identify what the passage is about and what it says about that topic. Lead with the phenomenon, problem, object, or consequential question when the genre permits. Do not reproduce the writer's path of discovery if the reader needs the problem before the solution.

3. Design global coherence

Choose a comprehensible order: causal, chronological, general-to-specific, problem-to-solution, comparison, or another explicit logic. Keep a recognizable topic or protagonist across related sentences. Use stable names for recurring concepts.

Make the relation between propositions recoverable—continuation, example, generalization, contrast, concession, cause, result, sequence, or attribution. Add a connector when the reader could reasonably infer the wrong relation, without narrating every editorial move.

4. Adopt classic style when it fits

For much public and explanatory prose, stage an intellectually equal writer directing an equal reader's attention to something in the world. Present the subject instead of foregrounding the writer's professional activity, process, apologies, or section management.

Treat classic style as a designed stance, not literal transparency or a claim of omniscience. Do not impose it wholesale on contracts, procedures, methods sections, formal proofs, safety warnings, advocacy, ceremonial prose, poetry, fiction, or any genre with a different communication situation.

5. Repair the curse of knowledge

Assume equal intelligence, not equal background. Diagnose unexpanded acronyms, specialist terms presented as ordinary words, hidden premises, missing inferential steps, abstract labels without referents, ambiguous pronouns, and examples whose relevance remains unstated.

Pair generalizations with examples. Define necessary terminology at first useful contact. Make actors, actions, causes, times, and quantities visible when abstraction conceals them. Retain efficient abstractions once the reader can recover their meaning.

6. Manage the word string

Prefer given information before new information and lighter material before heavier material when these improve first-pass processing. Keep subjects near their verbs, use parallel syntax for genuine parallels, and repair garden paths, dangling modifiers, ambiguous attachment, unstable referents, and telegraphic compression.

Do not use sentence length as a proxy for difficulty. A long, well-structured sentence may be clearer than a short ambiguous one.

Choose active or passive voice intentionally. Passive may be best when the affected entity is already the topic, the agent is unknown or irrelevant, familiar information belongs first, or a heavy agent belongs later. Flag it when it needlessly hides responsibility or compounds actionless abstraction.

7. Compress and tune

Cut repetition, clichés, throat-clearing, defensive metadiscourse, and status display that add no meaning. Replace needless nominalizations with actors and verbs when doing so preserves precision. Keep true conditions, exceptions, evidence limits, and domain terms.

Read aloud for backtracking, awkward rhythm, unintended emphasis, and articulation friction. Sound is a diagnostic for flow, not for truth.

8. Adjudicate usage

For a disputed rule, distinguish grammar, ambiguity, register, convention, house style, and taste. Ask whether careful writers observe it, whether it preserves a useful distinction, and whether the proposed correction improves clarity and grace. Consult current references when the decision matters.

Do not enforce folklore based only on Latin analogy, etymology, or a commentator's preference. Some arbitrary conventions still bind because a genre or audience expects them.

9. Test and iterate

When possible, ask a representative reader to paraphrase the claim and identify the first point of confusion. Reader feedback is evidence about communication, not a vote on truth or an instruction to accept every preference.

If no reader test occurred, say so rather than claiming readability has been validated. A cooling-off interval can make the draft less familiar and expose gaps.

For AI-assisted prose, run a final factual and anti-banality pass. Replace canned framing, generic uplift, empty symmetry, and plausible-sounding unsupported claims with specific observations, grounded examples, and defensible relationships.

Shape the response to the task

When revising, lead with the revised text. Follow with a compact rationale only when requested or useful. Explain material changes through the reader effect—missing context, ambiguity, backtracking, false relation, excess load, or register mismatch—not through commandments.

When auditing, prioritize truth and meaning, global coherence, knowledge gaps, syntax, then local usage and rhythm. Do not bury a structural failure under copyedits.

When teaching, show a strong or repaired passage, ask the learner to notice its effect, name the cognitive or rhetorical principle, contrast alternatives, assign a constrained rewrite, and test first-read comprehension.

Maintain attribution and fidelity

• Attribute classic style to Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner; Pinker adopts, promotes, and connects it to cognitive science.
• Attribute “curse of knowledge” to Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber; Pinker applies it prominently to prose and teaching.
• Do not credit Pinker with the phrase “zombie nouns,” the maxim “omit needless words,” topic strings, reading aloud, or revision as inventions.
• Do not ban passive voice, abstraction, technical vocabulary, hedges, long sentences, or signposts. Diagnose their function in context.
• Preserve facts, formal distinctions, uncertainty, accessibility, author's intent, and required terminology over stylistic elegance.
• Do not imitate Pinker's distinctive voice. Transfer principles, not verbal mannerisms.
• Present the pass sequence and edit ledger as this skill's synthesis, not as a procedure Pinker published.