Writing Tip

Accommodating Your Readers: The “Goldilocks Mode”

Difficulty Level: Advanced

Recommendation: Accommodate your reader’s default reading mode to prevent misreading.

Someone with good intentions directed me to a list of writing tips. Among them was this jewel: Don’t use a comma before the final item in a list. Why? To save the reader the trouble of parsing it, of course. But omitting that comma just to save a single character in a sea of characters is liable to cause misreading. People who dabble in educating writers often assert their “best practices” with a confidence based on a faulty assumption: that people read carefully. Research—a mass of research—confirms that readers dive headlong into a text and advance rather carelessly.

Ever driven a few miles around the town and arrive at a place without knowing how you got there? This state of disconnectedness is called automaticity, which, according to Wikipedia, is “the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit.” Just as you drive your car without mentally attending to low-level details, so do you read. Ever read a few pages of a book and realized you have no idea what you just read? Automaticity.

Automaticity in reading forms during the “learning to read” stage of education and is reinforced during the “reading to learn” phase (otherwise known as the “rest of your life”). So what does automaticity have to do with putting that final comma in your list? Because that comma is a crucial signpost on the winding back roads of a text, and when it comes to signposts, less is not more. In fact, the more signposts, the better. Sure, you’ll spend a few characters on linguistic signposts, but the benefits of their inclusion far outweigh the economy of their omission.

You can skip to today’s tips for accommodating the Goldilocks mode. To understand this reading mode in the context of other reading modes, read on (or, as you will see, perhaps I should say “raud on”).

The Modes of Reading

Just as a car has gears, so does reading. People read at different speeds based on many factors, but there is a sort of default reading mode that most readers engage when they enter a text. It’s not too fast, not too slow. It’s the Goldilocks mode of the reading process, and to anchor this concept of the reading process as my fundamental argument for including copious signposts in your technical writing, I want to use an older metaphor of horsepower: the horse.

A horse has four basic modes of locomotion called “gaits”: the walk, the trot, the canter, and the gallop. These are described below, for those who are interested in the details of distinction. The gist is that the Goldilocks mode of locomotion is the trot. It’s efficient and swift, not burning too many calories or fatiguing too many muscles, not delaying arrival.

	Walk: This is the slowest gait of a horse. It is steady and provides great stability, but it delays arrival.
	Trot: The trot is the safest and most efficient gait of the three gaits where the horse is suspended (a period when no hooves are on the ground). It is therefore the go-to gait of a horse that wants to travel from A to B with speed and without wearing itself out. Think of trotting as jogging.
	Canter: The canter is faster than a trot but not as efficient. It’s not quite an all-out sprint. Think of it as a paced race speed, like one would use to run a 5k.
	Gallop: This is an all-out sprint. If point A is a wolf attack and point B is a safe distance from that attack, a horse is likely to gallop there. Like cantering, galloping is not efficient. A horse that gallops cannot do so for very long unless it is trained to do so.

Similarly, readers have five basic modes of locomotion through a text. Here they are in the order of speed (from the slowest to the fastest in words per minute):

	Reading to Memorize: This is the slowest and most contemplative mode. Think of bearing down on a Shakespearean play to commit a soliloquy to memory. This is not really reading but rather rehearsal. Therefore, “reading speed” is not meaningful in this context. (It would take me a long time to memorize a soliloquy, but someone with eidetic memory could do it in minutes.)
	Reading to Learn: This is faster than ordinary reading (see “Rauding” below) but is characterized by inconsistent speed. The text is assumed to be challenging. Think of a student reading a text book, knowing that he is going to be tested on its content.
	Rauding: Rauding is a combination of “reading” and “auding.” Auding is the process of comprehending spoken language. So how does spoken language enter this discussion of reading documents? Because everything you read is translated into a “phonemic code,” which is sometimes called “silent speech.” Words are translated into silent speech (meaning that other people cannot hear you), but you hear this speech as you read. Rauding, then, is the most efficient way of reading that involves maximum (and accurate) comprehension of what you are reading, and it is fairly swift (it clocks in at between 200 and 300 words per minute). According to Ronald Carver (a pioneer in reading theory), this process is like “automatic pilot” during ordinary reading. In fact, automaticity (the unconscious assenting to this automatic reading machinery) is the reason for this tip. One might think that comprehension conferred by rauding is inferior to that conferred by reading to learn or reading to memorize, but in fact research indicates that rauding is superior for both accuracy of recall and comprehension. It is the most comfortable mode of reading and the default mode for most readers, which is why I call it the “Goldilocks mode.” Because it is highly automated, readers can easily crash if safeguards are not installed (a few of these safeguards are discussed below).
	Skimming: This is the rapid cherry picking of familiar words in a sentence to gain a general understanding, to get the gist of a text. Recall and comprehension of the text are both very low but may be good enough to answer a guiding question, such as, “Why did the company change its free-vaccination policy?” Skimming is not reading.
	Scanning: This is the fastest of the five “reading” modes. Scanning is just selective pattern recognition. The reader searches for a word or phrase within sentences. When he finds it, then he may (or may not) read the context. Readers can process over 600 words per minute in this mode. Speed-reading lies (pun intended) in this category. Neither scanning nor speed-reading is reading.

If the Goldilocks mode is characterized by rapid automaticity and is the default reading mode of most readers, then accommodating this reading mode is the responsibility of every author. Installing unambiguous signposts along the path of a sentence is the most conspicuous way of such accommodation. Think of it as holding the reader’s hand along a treacherous footpath. Readers will read in a headlong fashion, passively moving through a sentence, transported by the automatic reading machinery, creating meaning along the way. We, the authors of technical and often complex messages, can help them by installing signposts and removing impediments to fluid reading.

Installing Signposts: Three Simple Things You Can Do

Three things you can do to accommodate the Goldilocks mode are 1) use a comma after introductory elements, 2) use the “serial comma,” and 3) include “that” in your “that” clauses.

Use a comma after introductory elements.

Elements such as conjunctive adverbs (such as “therefore”), prepositional phrases (such as “in the beginning”), and subordinate clauses (such as “because the lamp flickered”) that introduce the main part of a sentence should always be followed by a comma. The comma is a signpost that says, “Okay, the introductory element has ended; here is the main part of the sentence.” Style guides may say that for short elements, commas are not necessary. But the author is in no position to make that call. He is too close to the text. If the conclusion of the introductory element is indeed self-evident for the reader, then the worst that you have done is introduce an extra character into a sentence. So what? If you omit it and enable the introductory element to sprawl into the main part of the sentence, the reader may misread the sentence. For example, consider this sentence:

After the summer projects will be evaluated by the board.

It may be clear to the author that the introductory element here ends with “summer,” but the reader may predict that “summer” is used as an adjective that modifies “projects,” resulting in confusion when he encounters the verb “will be evaluated.” If you always install a comma after an introductory element, this kind of misreading will never occur.

Use the serial comma.

The last item in a list gets attached to the previous items with a conjunction, such as “and” or “or,” like this: The technician tested the new device against voltage sags, voltage swells, and transients. That last comma is called a “serial comma.” Some style guides advise authors to use this “when required” (how does the author know?). Some style guides, most notably the Associated Press Stylebook, advise authors to always omit the serial comma. But the serial comma is a signpost for the hasty reader. It tells the reader, “The next item in the list is the last item in the list.” A common example of how omitting the serial comma can cause confusion is this short sentence: I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God. As shown, the serial comma is omitted, indicating that the author’s parents are Ayn Rand and God. With the comma properly installed, the reasonable interpretation is clear: The author is dedicating his book to four entities: 1) his mother, 2) his father, 3) Ayn Rand, and 4) God.

For more information about this tip, please see the full tip on serial commas.

Always include “that” in your “that” clauses.

There are two types of “that” clauses where the actual word that introduces them as “that” clauses is often omitted. Repetitive omissions of “that” in these clauses may impair the reader’s predictive powers as he moves headlong through one sentence after another. The first type is a relative clause. Consider this sentence:

Metal stock that has a QR factor of 10 or less will be discarded.

“that has a QR factor of 10 or less” is a relative clause that modifies “Metal stock.” Now, consider this sentence:

Lab work initiated in 2008 informs the current Demonstration.

In this case, “that” and the verb of the relative clause have been omitted. The reader may misread “initiated” as a verb, with “Lab work” as its subject. By including the omitted parts, you ensure that the reader will properly parse the sentence: Lab work that was initiated in 2008 informs the current Demonstration.

The second type of “that” clause is the noun clause, which, as its name implies, functions as a noun in a sentence. Consider this sentence:

Dr. Butterhouse knew that the cure for the virus was at hand.

Many writers may be tempted to omit “that” from this sentence. Indeed, some people recommend doing so in a misguided sense of linguistic thrift. But consider the consequences of omitting “that”: Dr. Butterhouse knew the cure for the virus was at hand. Without “that,” the reader may misread “the cure for the virus” as the object of “knew.” Then, when he encounters “was at hand,” he loses his footing on the one-log bridge that the author sent him across. So much for headlong automaticity. The reader now must change his approach to the text. In this case, reading becomes troubleshooting. What went wrong? He saw a verb, “knew,” and predicted an object. He got one: “the cure for the virus.” Who is to blame for this misreading? The responsibility for accommodating the heedless bustle of automaticity lies squarely within the responsibilities of the author.