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Home > Guidelines > 5. Reduce cognitive burdens. |
To make your text easier to understand: 5a. Reduce the number of clauses per sentence. 5b. Blow up nominalizations and noun trains. 5c. Watch out for ambiguous phrases a user might have to debate. 5d. Surface the agent and action, so users don't have to guess. |
5. Reduce cognitive burdens.When you load my brain up with confusing choices, ambiguous phrases, unparsable sentences, you impose a cognitive burden. You make me think--and not about your subject. You are making me translate, transform, interpret what you say. That effort distracts me from your point. |
Resources on thoughtlessness Taking a Position on Thoughtlessness Heuristic Online Text (H. O. T.) Evaluation of Cognitive Burdens On reducing cognitive burdens (Hot Text module, PDF, 1012K, or about 18 minutes at 56K) |
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