Thinking & Personal Effectiveness · Writing & Communication
A topic within Writing & Communication, itself one of 10 topics in that field and part of Thinking & Personal Effectiveness.
2 works
Herbert 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 2026