Putting editorial advice on an evidence base
Editorial advice can draw on research about how readers understand, remember, find and use information. An evidence base connects recommendations about text and design with tested effects on readers.
Research and recommendations
Written communication has theories and research findings that can help produce more effective texts more efficiently. Useful fields include composition, cognitive processing and learning, persuasion, publication design, visual perception, instructional design, web design and memory.
Research into written communication often uses four outcomes to examine textual features that help or hinder readers.
- Comprehension: how well readers understand the text.
- Recall: how long they remember it.
- Referencing time: how long they take to find specified information.
- Usability: how well they apply the information.
Building evidence-based writing and editing involves evaluating established research and disseminating useful findings as well as conducting new studies. Recommendations can then move from personal preference about what reads better to a research-supported explanation of how a change may improve comprehension.
Established research resources
A 2009 collection of classic written-communication research included the following works.
- Anderson, Technical Writing (1987).
- Anderson, Brockmann and Miller, editors, New Essays in Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, and Practice (1983).
- Benson, Writing Visually: Design Considerations in Technical Publications (1985).
- Britton, Woodward and Binkley, editors, Learning from Textbooks: Theory and Practice (1993).
- Charrow and Charrow, Making Legal Language Understandable: A Psycholinguistic Study of Jury Instructions (1979).
- Duffy and Waller, Designing Usable Texts (1985).
- Felker, editor, Document Design: A Review of the Relevant Research (1980).
- Felker, Pickering, Charrow, Holland and Redish, Guidelines for Document Designers (1981).
- Redish, How to Write Regulations (and Other Legal Documents) in Clear English (1981).
- Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design (1997).
- Schriver, Teaching Writers to Anticipate Readers’ Needs (1992).
- Souther, What Management Wants in the Technical Report (1962).