In this chapter you will learn how to

1. • create sentences readers process most easily

2. • choose the best possible subjects

3. • ensure your verbs work for you

4. • make your sentences both lean and mean – shorter and clearer.

According to neuroscience research, we're hard-wired to register cause and effect. In the 1940s, researchers showed volunteers animated films of circles, squares, and rectangles shuffling around the screen. The film was hardly the equivalent of an animated Gone with the Wind, but, when researchers asked their subjects to describe what they had seen, the men and women related charged scenarios involving not only causation but intention and even, for multiple participants, conflict between two men pursuing the same woman. In a later version of the same experiment, study participants repeatedly reported that the circle had been chasing the square – or the rectangle was pursuing the circle. More surprising, the subjects seemed inordinately hung up on cause and effect – what they described was invariably a full-fledged story. Later, studies with infants as young as six months similarly revealed the same fixation with cause and effect. Obviously, an inborn ability to perceive cause and effect would be rather handy, especially to early hunter–gatherers out scrounging around for dinner amid lions, tigers, or bears. That same ability today stops us from lovingly laying our hands on a stove burner or fondly running a finger along the sharp edge of a whacking great knife.

This same innate tendency can also explain our attraction to stories – even our hard news is delivered in the form of stories – and our ability to recall small, throwaway details when they're embedded in a story. Similarly, readers devour and recall easily sentences that include cause and effect. Make a sentence into a miniature narrative, and your readers will easily remember what you've written. In addition, they'll also mentally process your writing more quickly and with little awareness of the hard work that goes into reading.