Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
Making yourself understood, which is most of the job.
10 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
A Plain English Handbook: How to Create Clear SEC Disclosure Documents
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 1998
Argues that dense financial prose is a design choice, not a legal requirement, and shows through before-and-after rewrites that disclosure documents…
+5 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Philosophy of Style
Herbert Spencer · 1852
Argues that every rule of good composition follows from one principle — economy of the reader's mental effort — so a sentence is well made exactly to…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
De Inventione
Marcus Tullius Cicero · 90 BCE
Treats invention — discovering the arguments a particular case actually needs — as the first and most teachable of the five canons of rhetoric,…
+4 more at this level
12 of 16 works
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Argues that dense financial prose is a design choice, not a legal requirement, and shows through before-and-after rewrites that disclosure documents can be both precise and readable.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Plain Language Action and Information Network
Sets out concrete rules for writing official documents in plain English — short sentences, common words, active voice, direct address — on the argument that clarity is a legal and civic obligation, not a courtesy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Andrew Stanton (TED)
Argues that a story works by withholding one piece of information the audience wants and letting them supply it themselves, which is why a story that explains everything engages nobody.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David JP Phillips (TEDx)
Argues from working-memory research that most slides fail because they load text and speech into the same cognitive channel at once, and sets out concrete rules — one point per slide, images over bullet lists — to stop competing with the speaker.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Steven Pinker (The Royal Institution)
Argues that most bad prose comes from the curse of knowledge rather than carelessness, and that classic style — writing as directing the reader's gaze at something in the world — is the corrective.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Teaches technical writing as a small set of checkable habits, active voice, short sentences, defined terms, one idea per paragraph, rather than a matter of talent, with exercises to practise each one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Herbert Spencer
Argues that every rule of good composition follows from one principle — economy of the reader's mental effort — so a sentence is well made exactly to the degree that it costs less attention to decode than the idea it carries deserves.
about 85 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026George D. Gopen & Judith A. Swan
Argues that readers process sentences by expecting old information early and new information at the end, so prose reads as clear or muddled depending on structure rather than word choice or technical difficulty.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard E. Mayer & Roxana Moreno
Sets out nine concrete design changes, such as removing redundant on-screen text and synchronising narration with matching graphics, each justified by an experiment showing it reduces the working-memory load a slide places on an audience.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley, Jason Parker & Zhi-Wen Ng
Shows that writers of emails consistently overestimate how well their intended tone, including sarcasm, comes across to readers, because they hear their own intonation while composing in a way the reader never can.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Brett Mensh & Konrad Kording
Argues that a scientific paper's structure should carry its point independently of the prose, one point per paragraph, so a reader skimming only topic sentences still gets the argument.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Marcus Tullius Cicero
Treats invention — discovering the arguments a particular case actually needs — as the first and most teachable of the five canons of rhetoric, reducing persuasive structure to a method rather than an inspired gift.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.