I found this fascinating (and as a writer who labors over her prose, a little dismaying):
“Surprising new findings suggest an individual will remember a Facebook post longer than they’ll retain the memory of a sentence in a book. Experts believe the findings demonstrate how our memories favor natural, spontaneous writing over polished, edited content. This acknowledgment could have wider implications for the worlds of education, communications and advertising.
... Investigators believe that our minds may better take in, store, and bring forth information gained from online posts because they are in what the researchers call ‘mind-ready’ formats—i.e., they are spontaneous, unedited and closer to natural speech."
(Read more here.)
So maybe I should stop working so hard and write my book in the style of a Facebook post? But seriously, I love the idea of making our writing more “mind-ready”: getting rid of jargon and overly complex sentence structures, striving for a style that is fresh, forthright, expressive. That’s good writing, and now we know that it will linger longer in the reader’s mind.
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