What is the essence of great writing? Here are some answers:

• Keeping it simple
• Keeping it specific
• Keeping it surprising
• Keeping it stirring
• Keeping it seductive
• Keeping it smart
• Keeping it social
• Keeping it story-driven

Experience shows that, to write well, you keep every one of these in mind as you draft your next article or book. They are what I call the eight Ss, the secrets for great writing on my website’s Craft page.

The Ss come from slides I prepared for a book-writing workshop. I wanted a mnemonic for a simple set of writing strategies. Keep it simple, specific, surprising, stirring—they all added up to “KISS” eight times over.

I didn’t invent these strategies, of course. I just distilled them from great writers over the centuries.

One Big Thing for Writers

After coming up with the eight, a question arose: What ties them together? Is there a single principle that explains why readers want to keep reading every time you write with an S?

That question, as it turns out, sent me on a journey of scientific discovery. I was wondering what research on how our brains work would say. Is there an overarching principle to make readers love your writing?

The work of hundreds of psychologists and neuroscientists turned up some interesting experiments. It showed that each S affects readers minds in varied ways.

Take simplicity. Psychologist Nick Chater points out that people naturally love simplicity. Simple explanations, for example, are more easily encoded in the brain. They imprint better in your memory banks and you remember them more surely. 

Or specificity. Scientists like Alfonso Barrós-Loscertales and colleagues find that sensory words, just like sensory experiences, set the brain abuzz. When people read words like “salt,” “honey,” or “grape,” not just language-processing circuits but taste-processing circuits in the brain light up.

Or emotion—“stirring” writing. Graham Scott and colleagues, using an eye-fixation device, found that readers focus much faster on emotion-laden words—positive or negative—than words without emotion. Emotion grabs readers. 

Playing Across the Mind’s Stage

Such research began to show that one of the secrets to great writing is playing on multiple stages in the reader’s brain. To be sure, language plays first on one prominent brain stage, the region that process words, including the Wernicke’s area. But after that, it plays on a lot of other stages as well.

At first, I didn’t figure out what this added up to. In my next post, though, you’ll see that the Ss all trigger mental pleasure—which in the brain means readers get a dose of dopamine. I’m writing a book to show you how words, phrases, and sentences make that happen: Writing for Impact: 8 Secrets from Science That Will Fire Up Your Reader’s Brain.

Leaving aside brain operation for a moment, you can follow the Ss to write more richly to engage people’s brains more surely. That has long worked for great writers. A good start is to apply the first S, the easiest to work on: Keep it simple.

As Chater writes, “From our pleasure in ‘economy of language’ to our preferences for symmetries of a snowflake rather than the muddle of a lump of mud, simplicity appears to be a guiding aesthetic principle.” See also my recent article in Harvard Business Review:  https://hbr.org/2020/11/write-to-reward-your-reader