The Single Reason Why People Can't Write, According to a Harvard Psychologist

The root cause of bad writing is struggling to imagine what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. Whenever writing is loaded with jargon, clichés, technical terms, and abbreviations, two questions come to mind:

1. What is the writer is trying to say?
2. How can the writer state those ideas more clearly without using confusing language?

When we become good at our job or hobby, we use catchwords to shorten long-winded descriptions that we have become very familiar with.

The problem is that these catchwords become automatic. While we think these words would facilitate our communication, we forget that our readers may not understand the concepts behind these shortened words.