Having edited many, many people over the years, I feel confident in saying that writing is a natural gift that must be developed incrementally. If you don’t have that innate flair, you’ll just be hitting your head against a wall over and over (as will your editor). It’s really no different than music or athletics: Without the inborn goods, effort can go just so far. And if you don’t work very strenuously to develop the gift should you possess it, you’ll be left with a writer’s ego minus the ability. God help you.

Steven Pinker thinks the preponderance of lousy writing stems from something else: the Curse of Knowledge, which causes people who are experts at something to fail to communicate properly with those outside their expertise. (Think of an IT person sending you inexplicable instructions.) Sure, that’s true, but I don’t think it’s the main problem. Plenty of experts can write very well. From a Pinker piece in the Wall Street Journal:

The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows—that they haven’t mastered the argot of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

Anyone who wants to lift the curse of knowledge must first appreciate what a devilish curse it is. Like a drunk who is too impaired to realize that he is too impaired to drive, we do not notice the curse because the curse prevents us from noticing it. Thirty students send me attachments named ‘psych assignment.doc.’ I go to a website for a trusted-traveler program and have to decide whether to click on GOES, Nexus, GlobalEntry, Sentri, Flux or FAST—bureaucratic terms that mean nothing to me. My apartment is cluttered with gadgets that I can never remember how to use because of inscrutable buttons which may have to be held down for one, two or four seconds, sometimes two at a time, and which often do different things depending on invisible “modes” toggled by still other buttons. I’m sure it was perfectly clear to the engineers who designed it.

Multiply these daily frustrations by a few billion, and you begin to see that the curse of knowledge is a pervasive drag on the strivings of humanity, on par with corruption, disease and entropy. Cadres of expensive professionals—lawyers, accountants, computer gurus, help-line responders—drain vast sums of money from the economy to clarify poorly drafted text.•