Uncomfortable ideas and disfluent expression affect us similarly

Cognitive fluency

Integrating the research on cognitive fluency and cognitive dissonance can enrich our understanding of the cognitive strain (or excessive disfluency) produced by convoluted expression. I’ve extensively discussed  research on cognitive fluency-disfluency, whose basic lesson is that when a message is understood effortlessly it is more believable. Daniel Kahneman in his landmark work in cognitive psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) at pp. 62 – 64, provides the following advice on minimizing cognitive strain in persuasive writing:

• Maximize legibility.
• Do not use complex language when simpler language will do.
• Make the message memorable.
• Choose sources with names that are easy to pronounce.

Cognitive dissonance

The term now part of the vernacular, cognitive dissonance, a social-psychology research program started by Leon Festinger in 1956, refers to our aversion to disharmonious ideas, but there’s unfortunately no quick way to understand what disharmonizes ideas. You have to grasp the concept from key experiments. I present two, displaying the breadth of the cognitive-dissonance concept:

In the “$1 and $20 experiment,” subjects performed a boring task, which they understood as the experiment’s real purpose, and they then sought to persuade another subject to participate on the ground that the experience was interesting. One group was offered $1 and the other $20 for their persuasive efforts (today’s values would be inflated by a factor of 7.5). Both groups subsequently evaluated the boring task’s enjoyability. The then-surprising result, as Festinger predicted, was that the subjects receiving $1 rated the boring task more interesting than did the subjects receiving $20. The counter-intuitiveness of the results is what made cognitive dissonance the most popular research program in social psychology in the 1960s: under the reigning reinforcement theory, the subjects in the $20 condition should have rated the task more interesting, since they were reinforced (rewarded) more for claiming it was interesting. Festinger had predicted the results by reasoning that the subjects in the $1 condition would experience more cognitive dissonance due to the disharmoniousness  between the two beliefs: 1) they had misrepresented a boring task and 2) they had done it for a mere dollar.

In another study, Festinger observed a group of fanatics who believed the end of the world was nigh and sought to prepare for it. When the world didn’t end, rather than relinquish their belief, they elaborated and deepened it by explaining away the disconfirmation and becoming yet more fanatical. To make their beliefs more harmonious, they construed the apparent disconfirmation as confirmation.

While my concern is to apply cognitive-dissonance research to cognitive strain, which is directly relevant to writing persuasively, cognitive fluency also clarifies cognitive dissonance, needing clarification because defining the harmoniousness that reduces dissonance is elusive. Social psychologist Eliot Aronson had proposed that cognitive dissonance comes from conflicts with self-concept, but recent research hasn’t supported this interpretation: choices affect beliefs even when the earlier beliefs are forgotten. (See Coppin et. al, I'm No Longer Torn after Choice: How Explicit Choices Implicitly Shape Preferences for Odors (2010) Psychological Science 21(4) 489 ‒ 493.) Cognitive-fluency theory suggests that disharmonious (dissonant) beliefs are beliefs whose understanding takes effort. They are disfluent beliefs, although the disfluency arises not from the manner of expression, as in cognitive-fluency research, but from the content of the beliefs.

Just as cognitive disfluency is useful in persuasion, so is cognitive dissonance, although the uses of dissonance, like those of disfluency, have been largely overlooked. To discourage the error of ignoring dissonance’s uses, I’ll offer a few obvious examples supporting the position that just as there’s an optimal level of fluency, so there’s an optimal level of dissonance needed to maintain a reader’s interest. It’s well known that skilled readers of fiction prefer complex to simple characters; paradox can be useful in exposition; and implausible beliefs and even logical contradiction have helped make religions popular—as with the Trinity doctrine.

Lessons for persuasive writing

Now for what cognitive dissonance research implies about cognitive fluency. The research on cognitive dissonance conceives it as a drive to reduce an unpleasant arousal state: we’re motivated to reduce dissonance. (Kiesler and Pallak, Arousal properties of dissonance manipulations (1976) Psychological Bulletin, 83(6), 1014 ‒ 1025.) Cognitive-fluency researchers haven’t considered the motivation behind the preference for cognitive ease, but if cognitive-dissonance reduction is due to the motive that also enhances the believability of fluent messages, that has lessons for writers. The difference is that cognitive strain's unpleasantness motivates the reader to reject the disfluent expression, not only to find the fluent more credible. The analogy to cognitive dissonance suggests that when we disbelieve the disfluent, it’s because believing the disfluent is uncomfortable. Since we must believe to understand, unpleasant affect associated with the effort to understand prejudices the reader against the proposition itself even when it’s later expressed clearly.

The implication is that persuasive writers should avoid unwarranted disfluencies even when they're immediately clarified. If a concept is hard to understand without examples, prematurely presented conceptualizations undermine subsequent understanding. It's better to introduce the examples before the proposition they support.

Cognitive strain's unpleasantness supports using the method of successive approximations for introducing complex ideas. To use successive approximation, the writer presents a simplified concept that is subsequently elaborated in a series of changes, each simple enough to avoid cognitive strain.

The unity of comprehension and belief and the common failure to grasp opposing arguments

Legal briefs should rebut opposing arguments, but often trial attorneys handle opposition by reiterating or at best buttressing their affirmative cases. Since the skills for arguing and rebutting are probably identical—as shown by the interchangeability of attorneys experienced in suing or defending—weak rebuttals aren't due to unbalanced skills. The formulaic character of nominal rebuttals suggests attorneys don't fully understand their opponents' legal arguments. An illuminating explanation comes from the psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert's research on the unity of comprehension and belief, according to which understanding a text or utterance requires, minimally, its momentary acceptance as true.

Comprehension induces belief

Gilbert and his colleagues have corroborated a theory of what I call the unity of comprehension and belief :

1. To understand any message, the recipient must suspend disbelief and accept the message as true.
2. Unless the recipient rejects the message—by a subsequent conscious or unconscious decision—the recipient will continue believing.

These are momentous conclusions: psychologists had agreed with common sense, which says we can neutrally evaluate a contention and delay accepting or rejecting it. Gilbert's evidence comes from scientific experiments, but one rationale from evolutionary psychology helps clarify why it should be so: conceptual belief is an extension of perceptual belief, and we consider our perceptions true until we have reasons to doubt them.

False confidence impresses juries

Another theory from evolutionary psychology is needed to understand the importance of the unity of comprehension and belief for appellate and motion practice: the theory of self-deception, which the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers sets out in his new book, The folly of fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life (2011). People aren't objective about their own prospects; clients, for example, have excessively optimistic anticipations about the results of litigation. According to Trivers and evolutionary psychologists, humans evolved self-deception because it facilitated deceiving others, as in a bargaining process in which parties can bluff more effectively if they fool themselves too; the bluffing party "honestly" overvalues its claim.

Trial attorneys confident of the righteousness of their clients' causes are often more persuasive with juries, and true to theory, they often manifest a biased confidence in the cases they are prosecuting or defending. Regardless of whether they realize it, they commit to maintaining their confidence. Attorneys may think their confidence isn't threatened by strong arguments from opponents because, on the common-sense view—rejecting the unity of comprehension and belief—they needn't evaluate the argument, only find the best answer. Didn't law school teach them how to argue both sides of a question? But the unity of comprehension and belief bars the attorney from emerging unscathed from genuine argumentative engagement, and at some level, trial attorneys learn this. To understand the argument, they must believe the argument, at least temporarily, but once they believe, they're at risk for being unable to disbelieve it later. We aren't free to believe what we want, except by refusing to comprehend what we reject. People generally fail to understand attacks on their core beliefs, and attorneys are unlikely to understand arguments undermining their confidence.

False confidence creates ostriches

A publicized case of incompetent lawyering illustrates by providing a good example of a trial attorney’s incomprehension: the appellant’s reply brief failed to rebut dispositive case authority, and the appellant's attorney attained notoriety after Judge Richard A. Posner's opinion represented him pictorially as an ostrich. Judge Posner speculated that the attorney was forum shopping by avoiding mention of a panel he sought to avoid, an unlikely explanation, since the 7th Circuit has long had a bullet-proof system of random case assignment. Judge Posner might have unwittingly achieved his second purpose—besides denouncing the attorney's omission to warn other attorneys—pitching the efficiency of visual matter in briefs and opinions. The ostrich picture was a more plausible depiction than the verbal speculation, in that appellant’s attorney truly didn't believe the omitted case was relevant.

The attorney that Judge Posner ridiculed had served as trial attorney below. What saves legal disputation is that the advantages of self-deception pertain to oral communication, where observers, such as jurors, can detect the involuntary cues—facial, tonal, and postural—betraying the dissimulator. The importance of thoroughly comprehending an argument to refute it argues for a division of labor between talkers and writers.

Construal-level theory: Matching linguistic register to the case's granularity

“Brutus stabs Caesar,” wrote Shakespeare, but it would have been as accurate, if less apt, to say Brutus murders Caesar, kills Caesar, or attacks Caesar. Those descriptions are more abstract, global, high-level, general, or far. Alternately, Shakespeare could have described Brutus as plunging a dagger deep into Caesar’s chest. That description, compared to the original, is concrete, local, low-level, specific, or near. These distinctions correspond to low versus high granularity of the information they convey, and construal-level theory from social psychology finds the bearers of different mindsets—each receptive to information elicited in one or the other mode, denominated far and near—are prone to continued use of the same mindset in approaching new information. While Shakespeare could have described the stabbing at different granularities, they convey different information and focus on different features of the information.

Similarly, different legal cases or legal issues naturally present as relatively far or near. If Julius Caesar were a murder case, a defense attorney mounting an insanity defense for Brutus would rely on the far mode because the focus would be on abstractions regarding intent and knowledge, whereas a prosecutor would benefit more if the case elicits the near mode to focus on the brutal details. By varying the level of deep formality, as described in the theory of two Belgian linguists, the brief writer can dispose a judge to use the far mode or the near mode because formal is far and informal is near.
 

Construal-level theory: Thinking  far or near

First, the basics of construal-level theory. (See Trope and Liberman, Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance (2010) 117 Psychological Review 440.) When you look at an object in the distance and look at the same object nearby, you focus on different features. Distal information is high-level, global, central, and unchanging, whereas local information is low-level, detailed, incidental, and changing. Construal-level theorists term distal information far and local information near, and they extend these categories broadly to embrace psychological distance. Dimensions other than physical distance can be conceived as psychological distance by analogy, and these other dimensions invoke mindsets similar to those physical distance invokes.

Among the dimensions expressing psychological distance are distance in time (from the present), social distance, and logical distance (hypotheticality). High-level information, in general, invokes the far mode: theories, general trends, desirability (rather than feasibility), the future, and pros (versus cons). Low-level information invokes the near mode: irregular developments, special task and situational characteristics, feasibility, and cons.

This description of construal-level theory is abstract (far), but now, by applying it to brief writing, I’ll bring it nearer. The key to this application is that the main dimension differentiating writing styles, degree of formality, influences the reader’s construal level: informal is near and formal is far. Formality will get further sustained attention in this entry, but for now, it’s enough to apply the maxim from the formality series: to write informally, imitate speech. Writing invokes the far mode because, unlike speech, it is typically used to communicate over distances of space and time. Construal-level theory predicts that informality, on the other hand, elicits a near, low-level information mindset. By eliciting the near mode, somewhat informal writing will render the court more receptive to information that elicits the near mode, with its concrete style, focusing on low-level information. The chart below depicts the association between types of argument and optimal construal level.

Arguments pro are far and arguments con are near, so the level of formality should be lower in a respondent’s brief than in petitioner’s brief and lower in an opposition than a motion or a reply brief. Pro arguments are far because change—due to both its future orientation and hypotheticality—is more psychologically distant than the status quo.

The best level of formality also depends on whether you are arguing based on the law or the facts, the law being far and the facts near. Facts are local, contingent, and changing, like an object shifting when viewed from nearby, whereas the law is global, of the essence, and mostly unchanging.

If your arguments are based on law, a further distinction applies: black-letter law is near and public policy is far. The meaning of black-letter law is usually apparent from a textual analysis, a detail-oriented analysis compared with the vaguer, abstract considerations in assessing public policy.

Deep formality and informality: Writing  far or near

A theory of deep and surface formality from linguistics defines the tactic of adjusting style to case granularity. (See F. Heylighten & Jean-Marc Dewaele Formality of Language: definition, measurement and behavioral determinants (1999).) Formality here doesn’t mean using legalese, and informality doesn’t mean writing colloquially. This is important to note because most of the discussion of formality by commentators on legal writing, including that contained in Disputed Issues, concerns surface formality, but to vary the construal level of a brief, writers should change its deep formality. Surface formality uses outmoded forms for the sake of convention and is the relevant topic for discussing the formalities, rules that protect the judge’s sense of social status or distance. The main thesis of these linguists’ theory of deep and surface formality is that deep formality centers on avoiding ambiguity by minimizing context-dependence. Communication is formal in this deep sense when it is explicit and definite, rather than understood tacitly.

This further clarifies why degree of formality influences the reader’s construal level. Informal writing is similar to oral communication in its dependence on a shared context, including contemporaneous observations and common memories, which informal communicators use to disambiguate expressions.

A chart in the formality series partitions the formal register into four practices: indirect personal reference, hyper-grammatical rules, succinctness over naturalness, and expressive universality. A pattern was apparent but remained unexplained: some kinds of formality help the brief writer achieve clarity and concision, but other kinds of formality defeat writers’ purposes.

The linguists’ theory of deep and surface formality explains the pattern. Indirect personal reference and hypergrammatical rules are surface formality, involving what the linguists call “frozen forms”—best disregarded except when rules of formality dictate. I recommended the informal register with respect to those two groups of practices. Another set of practices, which involve an artificial naturalness, lacking succinctness, can probably be best understood as the informal analog of surface formality, being a stylized, often folksy mimicry of oral communication, forming the matrix of the new obfuscation, “plain-talk writing.” 

Brief writers should shun this kind of informality, and I recommended the formal register for this practice. Finally, I also recommended the formal register for expressive universality, which from the perspective of enforcing formalities as conventions is the least important aspect of formality to conform to but is the most important for calibrating the level of formality in briefs. Expressive universality, only marginally important for conventional surface formality, is deep formality’s essence.

Adjusting deep formality to elicit a far or near mindset

Judge Richard A. Posner’s essay on pure and impure styles is a somewhat helpful guide to varying a brief’s level of deep formality to elicit the most receptive mindset in the judge. (See R. A. Posner, Judges' Writing Styles (And Do They Matter?) (1995) 62 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1421.) Posner’s distinction between the pure style (formal, far) and the impure style (informal, near) classifies judicial opinions rather than briefs, so many of the devices Posner’s pure-style jurists employ involve surface formality, used to impress and even obfuscate—tactics that would violate status formalities if an attorney used them. The pure style, inasmuch as it manifests deep formality, is characterized by a systematic approach to analysis, where the legal issues are presented in their theoretical context. Judge Benjamin Cardozo was an example of a pure stylist. In Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad, dealing with proximate cause, Cardozo considered the theoretical question of whether a distal cause perdures when a proximate cause intervenes. An impure legal opinion would concern itself more narrowly with resolving the issue in practical terms. Thus, Judge Harold Friendly, a practitioner of a mixed style according to Posner, when trying a case where a definition of proximate cause would have helped, avoided a general approach, writing, “How much ink would have been saved over the years if the Court of Appeals had reversed Mrs. Palsgraf’s judgment on the basis that there was no evidence of negligence at all.” (In re Kinsman Transit Co. (2d Cir. 1964) 338 F.2d 708, 721, note 5.)

Judge Friendly was more informal than Judge Cardozo, invoking a near construal level, because his opinion scrutinized the particulars of the case record. To induce a near mindset, focus on resolving the issues rather than setting them in legal context; focus on the factual context rather than the theoretical context. To induce a far mindset, be comprehensive and make your brief self-sufficient.

Some writers contend that every brief should be completely understandable without relying on the record or the judge's case knowledge. This is good advice for inducing a far mindset, but if your case argument is fact-based and you represent a respondent, a more informal style, which aims at setting out only what the judge needs to learn, can be more persuasive.

“Decision fatigue”: Its implications for analyzing issues on appeal

A controversial theory from psychology, decision fatigue carries unconventional implications for brief writing. The theory holds that the act of choosing and other acts of self-control draw on a limited store of energy, which you can only fully replenish with a night’s sleep, although drinking or eating sugar brings immediate relief. When you run out of decision-making juice, you avoid choosing or you choose impulsively, and you are more apt to lose self-control, whether by raging at someone, failing to persevere at an unpleasant task, or (especially) over-eating. While people are depleted by too many choices and although people should economize on their decision-making, avoiding choice isn’t always the answer, since unwanted tasks also deplete the energy store devoted to self-control.

Decision fatigue explains some experiences of writers. The writing process is decision laden, which probably explains the paucity of words—estimated as low as 500—a writer can set down in good order on any given day. The replenishment sugar provides explains why writers tend to get fat—if they do—although I only get scrawnier.

These experiences were never terribly hard to explain, but you probably wouldn’t expect the following, which exposes a source of judicial bias. In an Israeli study, researchers found that decisions were favorable to candidates for parole in 70% of cases heard in the early morning, but 10% of cases heard in the late afternoon. Research reports emphasize that the judges react to depletion by opting for the default, but for lawyers’ purposes, the most important finding may be that the court’s default option is to deny a petition.

While the study dealt with only a single venue, it suggests that depleting the judge’s willpower disadvantages the petitioner—a result providing writers of appellants’ briefs with another reason to avoid issue proliferation—but the respondent may benefit from the judge's depletion. The effect is probably not as strong as in the Israeli parole hearings, where the risk of granting parole was much greater than of denying it; whereas in an appellate case, reversal is only moderately more risky than affirmance. The difference is enough to make affirmance the default alternative, experienced as involving less choice, mainly because the reversing court has to state publicly that colleagues erred.

If depleting the judge’s supply of willpower benefits respondents, they may help themselves by using a slightly subversive strategy. The respondent should try to increase the judge’s decisional load yet must also avoid confusing or antagonizing the judge by originating needless complexity. The respondent can sometimes achieve these often-opposed goals jointly by repackaging the issues presented on appeal. Knowing that that decision fatigue benefits respondents should reduce their worry that restating the issues to simplify their briefs complexifies decision-making by the courts, which, depletingly, must now consider competing issue sets.

The work on decision fatigue, undertaken primarily by Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues, has been criticized by social psychologist Carol Dweck, who found that believing you have an unlimited supply of willpower can enable acting as if you have it abundantly. Although popular coverage of Dweck’s research has submerged the original findings, the Dweck research bears little practical significance. People can eke out painfully higher levels of willpower, but they don’t ordinarily want to.

"Plain talk" writing: The new literary obfuscation

“Plain-talk” writing has replaced pretentious writing as the main stylistic mannerism impeding thought. More than a half century ago, George Orwell identified vague abstraction and stale imagery as contributors to political bedevilment: they are the means for making the vile acceptable by concealing its substance. The object of Orwell’s scorn hasn’t disappeared. Politicians and their sycophants still substitute high-flown cliché for penetrating depiction, but that form of literary dishonesty is, today, overshadowed by the abuse of cognitive fluency—by the cult of simplicity. This mode’s mainstay is the non-sequitur; its object of concealment, logical irrelevance; its mechanism, the short, plain sentence. When the new obfuscation becomes pedagogy, writing teachers present its virtue as that of writing as you talk; they call the style “conversational.” It demonstrates that concreteness and vagueness are entirely compatible.

Everyone knows you can’t write efficaciously the same as you talk. So, common sense revises the plain-talk project—using the simple and illogical expressional methods the advocates purvey. A writing blog, CopyBlogger, advises—to the applause of commenters—“Write like you talk, except better. Better words, better arrangement, better flow.” As if this advice were informative.

As a rule, no examples are given, and some of this style’s most ardent practitioners may deny their practice of “writing as you talk.” Writing teacher Wayne Schiess responded to Dr. George D. Gopen’s disparagement of this advice by calling his argument a straw man. Wayne had never heard this advice.

Blogger Luke Muehlhauser provides the rare express example of writing as you talk, and his example ably, if unwittingly, demonstrates how this approach to writing undermines lucid thought: (1), below, is Muehlhauser’s rendition of how a writer would ordinarily state a thought; (2) is Muehlhauser’s recommended rewriting, designed to combine the clarity of writing with the readability of talk:

(1) Perhaps the toughest intellectual work we must do regarding European reconstruction is to realize that it can be achieved through nonpolitical instrumentalities. Reconstruction will not be politics, but engineering.

(2) We have a tough job ahead of us. We need to figure out how to reconstruct Europe. It won’t happen with political forces. The European reconstruction will be a matter of engineering, not politics.

The plain-talk version, (2), is more cognitively fluent than is (1): it deftly hides the contradictions and vagueness baldly evident in (1). First, reference to “instrumentalities” in (1) impels readers to seek to identify them and calls readers’ attention to the merely negative characterization of the “instrumentalities” as “nonpolitical.” Second, the reader of (1) naturally demands to know how “we” are supposed to act through “nonpolitical instrumentalities,” when “politics,” after all, denotes our means for consciously coordinating the actions of numerous persons. Third, if realizing that Europe can’t be reconstituted through politics requires tough intellectual work (it actually was reconstructed through the very political Marshall Plan) the writer isn’t entitled to announce the conclusion in advance of the required work. These objections, occurring naturally to the reader of (1), make that version clear but hard to read. The reader tries to make sense of it, in the face of signals that (1) is false, and readers find known falsehood harder to understand than probable truth.

The “plain-talk” version, (2), expresses the same information contained in (1). The difference is that the clauses in (2) are poorly connected. Although (2) urges readers to figure out how “we” can reconstruct Europe, the inconceivability of collective action being nonpolitical is pushed from the foreground by replacing nonpolitical instrumentalities, through which we act, with nonpolitical forces, which happen. Furthermore, the unexpressed connection between, on the one hand, the conclusion about Europe’s nonpolitical reconstruction and, on the other, the intellectual work from which the conclusion follows, hides absurdity, that of announcing in advance a conclusion of work undone.

The integration fostered by (1)’s concision fosters skepticism of its flawed reasoning. The disjointed “conversational” style of (2) makes the flawed reasoning easier to overlook. Whether Muehlhauser prefers this outcome is unclear.

How new is cognitive fluency?

Except for the Baker law-review article discussed in the Disputed Issues entry on cognitive disfluency, and the Disputed Issues entry applying cognitive-fluency principles to citation formats, the legal-writing world has paid scant attention to the spate of cognitive-fluency research, which appraises simplicity’s benefits and drawbacks for document reception. Plain-language blogger Cheryl Stephens captures what may be the chary outlook of many legal writers:

Scientific research has expanded so much in the last 20 years that plain language practitioners could not keep up. Money for research is needed to ensure that plain language procedures take advantage of current scientific discoveries. The most significant of these seem to be in the new area of study: cognitive fluency.

Another likely source of neglect is a prevalent belief that cognitive fluency is but a fashionable name for well-known effects. The cognitive-fluency results are new but not hard to understand, yet embodying the results in crisp recommendations is elusive, requiring an understanding of the tension between the writing Virtues Clarity and Concision, as their reciprocal modulation balances fluency and disfluency.

Cognitive fluency can seem like old hat because writers have long appreciated the value of minimizing mental effort for comprehension. Much of the recent findings’ novelty lies in in the advantages of disfluency; but even regarding fluency’s advantages, the research differs from traditional understanding, where avoidance of unnecessary complexity is based on the reader’s limited capacity to maintain multiple thoughts in a conscious state simultaneously, a rationale defining simplicity as well as justifying it. At least as long ago as 1852, when philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote The Philosophy of Style, this limited-capacity concept underpinned the rationale that the less capacity readers must allocate to decoding a communication, the more they can allocate to thinking about it. Readers were also expected to be less likely to misunderstand the simple, since it left spare capacity. The Disputed Issues entry “A rare shortcut to better writing” applied the hoary theory of limited-capacity attention to writing’s production, to explain how faster typing improves it. Science had seemingly vindicated the limited-capacity theory when psychologist George Miller published his finding that humans had a limited short-term memory capacity that varied between five and nine bits of information, as when a tester reads a digit series, one number per second, and few subjects will be able to remember more than nine or less than five. Miller’s finding this consistent limitation of conscious apprehension—Miller’s famous “magic number seven plus or minus two”—ensured that the digit-span test would remain part of standard intelligence testing, despite the low correlation with general intellect.

The past decade’s cognitive psychology retains the concept of working memory, but reconceptualizes it as the person’s skill in directing attention to recently conscious or related thoughts, which, hypothetically, are “activated” but unconscious. The subject’s preconscious thoughts—to use Freud’s term for ideation not conscious but amenable to being made so—are accessed in experiments where the subject is diverted from a memory task by subsequent attention-consuming operations. An easy test of this kind is given during standard psychiatric mental-status examinations, when the tester directs the patient to recall three words, which must be recited at the end of the examination, during which the tester elicits unrelated information. That the important component of working memory isn’t limited by fixed storage implies that we can’t deduce mnemonic efficiency from simplicity (which is to say, from cognitive fluency). Here’s an example—compare (1) and (2):

(1) Sentences can be short. They can also be long. This is a good thing. Lack of variety is wearying. It may drive you to distraction.

(2) It’s a good thing that sentences can be short or long, because lack of variety is wearying and may drive you to distraction. (H/T: Mark Nichol, Daily Writing Tips [for the examples].)

The four-sentence version (1) is simpler, its simple sentences bereft of complicating structural nuance. Speaking theoretically, the complex sentence (2) activates more unconscious ideas, inducing a more powerful working memory, not one limited to the simple sentences’ smaller ambit.

If the clearest prose isn’t the most fluent, if clarity is an optimum on the fluent – disfluent dimension, then the advantages of clarity aren’t those of simplicity. What, then, is the advantage of clarity? The answer might seem self-evident. Obviously, it might be thought, a writer wants to be clear so that he will be understood to mean what he does mean. Clarity means easily understood, the “obvious” thought continues, and the easier it is to understand, the more likely it will be understood. But this is fallacy. What requires less effort to understand is not, in logic or in fact, necessarily clearer, more likely to be understood—not if greater effort is forthcoming. This is the nontraditional conclusion on which cognitive-fluency and working-memory research converge.