From Blah to Aha! The Science of Good Writing
April 30, 2025
It’s safe to say I have always skewed much more to the arts than maths and science. (Although for reasons still unclear to me, I did take calculus in the first year of my university English degree!)
That I am more arts than science has always been a source of mild friction between me and my partner—the very scientific, very mathematical, engineer-trained Richard.
Richard’s brain appears to work in a completely different way than mine. He genuinely enjoys a good problem, and if I seek his help when struggling to open something or reassemble said thing after I’ve managed to take it apart—or break it—his advice, more often than not, is “puzzle it out.”
Yeah, well…you know the old proverb: Give a woman a fish, and she can eat for a day. Teach a woman to fish, and she can eat for a lifetime. Proverbs are silly. Just give me the fish, I say.
That said, having now spent over forty years with “Mr. Science,” as some of his law-school pals call Richard, I have definitely learned to appreciate—even be intrigued and delighted by—both science and math.
For example, listening recently to the CBC Ideas series on “The Greatest Numbers of All Time,” I found myself quite excited to learn that there is a very simple way to arrive at the square of any number ending in “5.”
As explained by Arthur Benjamin, Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in California, if a number ends in five, the square will always end in 25. To get the beginning, take the first digit of the number you are squaring, and multiply it by the next highest digit. Add that result to 25 and, presto, you have your square! (Benjamin is also a magician, so he gets to say things like “presto.”)
So…just say you’re at a cocktail party this weekend, and someone casually asks you, “What is 35 squared?”
There’s no need to panic. Professor Benjamin has your back. You know the square ends in 25. Now take the first digit – 3 – and multiply by the next digit up – 4: 3 x 4 is 12. Et voilà! The square of 35 is 1225. (What the square of 34 is….well, that’s a different kettle of fish, and anyway, who cares? It doesn’t end in 5!)
Wow! Just knowing I have that neat little party trick up my sleeve gives me an instant hit of pleasure-inducing dopamine.
And guess what else can give you a hit of dopamine? Good writing.
In his Harvard Business Review article, “The Science of Strong Business Writing,” author and writing coach Bill Birchard says: “Advances in neurobiology and psychology show with data, and in images, exactly how the brain responds to words, phrases and stories.”
Citing various studies, Birchard explains:
“Good writing gets the reader’s dopamine flowing in the area of the brain known as the reward circuit. Great writing releases opioids that turn on reward hot spots. Just like good food, a soothing bath, or an enveloping hug, well-executed prose makes us feel pleasure, which makes us want to keep reading.”
Birchard goes on to say:
“Scientists using MRI and PET machines can literally see how reward regions clustered in the midbrain light up when people read certain types of writing or hear it spoken aloud. Each word, phrase, or idea acts as a stimulus, causing the brain to instantly answer a stream of questions: Does this promise value? Will I like it? Can I learn from it?”
According to Birchard, “the magic happens when prose has one or more of these eight characteristics: It’s simple, specific, surprising, stirring, seductive, smart, social, or story-driven.”
Speaking about simplicity, Birchard sounds as if he’s just came from one of my plain language workshops: “Simplicity increases what scientists call the brain’s ‘processing fluency.’ Short sentences, familiar words, and clean syntax ensure the reader doesn’t have to exert too much brainpower to understand your meaning.”
Here’s what Birchard has to say about the other seven characteristics:
Specificity: One study showed that reading or hearing specific words (“blue jay” versus “bird”) activated more neurons in the visual and motor strip parts of the brain than did the general ones. For the non-science person like me, Birchard helpfully explains this means the specific words caused the brain to process meaning more robustly.
The element of surprise: Researchers from the Wharton School examined nearly 7,000 online New York Times articles. They found those rated “most surprising” were 14% more likely to be on the newspaper’s “most emailed” list.
Stirring language: Birchard says emotional language is more likely to persuade. Experiments show that when people hear a list of words, they often miss a few due to “attentional blinks” caused by limits in our brain processing power. “But we don’t miss the emotionally significant words,” Birchard writes. “With those there are no blinks.”
Seductiveness: Humans are hard-wired to savor anticipation—scientists call this “anticipatory utility.” Birchard suggests you can build up the same sort of excitement when you structure your writing by winding up people’s curiosity about what’s to come. Even a simple tweak, like starting a report with a question rather than a statement, can make business writing more “seductive.”
Smart thinking: Another way to please readers, says Birchard, is to make them feel "smart."
Researchers asked people to first read three simple words, then identify a fourth that relates to all three. Meanwhile MRI machines and EEGs recorded the readers’ brain activity. When study participants arrived at a solution, their delight was visible: “Brain regions near the right temple [lit] up, and so [did] parts of the reward circuit in the prefrontal cortex and midbrain.”
Social connection: Our brains are also hard-wired to crave human connection. A study of readers’ responses to different kinds of literary excerpts showed that passages with people in them activated brain areas responsible for interpreting social signals; in turn this triggered the participants’ reward circuits.
To help readers connect with you and your writing, Birchard suggests inserting more traces of yourself into your writing. This is something my friend—and excellent communicator—Michael Katz, is always urging us business writers to do. For one example, read his blog post “I *NOT* Robot.”
Storytelling: Birchard is not alone in pushing the power of stories. Bernadette Jiwa, author of Story Driven and other excellent books on “standing out with a better story,” reminds us that, “Stories are a compass for the heart. They move us to act, to create a better future we cannot yet see.”
And maybe now we know why. Functional MRI scans done by researchers at Princeton University reveal that when a story begins, listeners’ brains immediately begin glowing in a specific pattern, one that matches the storyteller’s exactly. At the same time, midbrain regions of the reward circuit come to life.
Birchard also cites a University of Texas study, albeit not scientific, that looked at the effectiveness of business crowdfunding campaigns. There, the researcher found that the richer the pitch narrative, the more favourably it was received. Study participants not only gave higher marks for entrepreneur credibility and business legitimacy—they also expressed more willingness to invest in the projects and share information about it. The implication for Birchard: “No stories, no great funding success.”
On the CBC Ideas series, Professor Benjamin, a self-described “mathmagician,” says he loves math because “only in math can you say things with absolute certainty.”
But I think Birchard has made a pretty good argument that the “the criteria for making better writing choices are more objective than you think.”
So, there you have it: science that validates my “artistic” thinking. That should light up my brain and Richard’s too.
Remember this:
Advances in neurobiology and psychology show that good writing gets readers’ dopamine flowing in the area of the brain known as the reward circuit. To activate your readers’ reward circuit, make sure your writing has one or more of these eight characteristics: simple, specific, surprising, stirring, seductive, smart, social, or story-driven.