Your user's brain wants a conversation!

Which would you prefer to listen to--a dry formal lecture or a stimulating dinner party conversation?
Which would you prefer to read--a formal academic text book or an engaging novel?

When I pose this question to authors or instructors, I usually hear, "You think the obvious answer is the dinner party and the novel, but it isn't that simple."

Followed by, "It all depends on the context. I'd much rather hear a dry formal lecture on something I'm deeply interested in than listen to inane dinner party conversation about Ashlee's lip-syncing blunder."

But here's what's weird--your brain wants to pay more attention to the party conversation than the formal lecture regardless of your personal interest in the topic.

Because it's a conversation.

And when your brain thinks it's part of a conversation, it thinks it has to pay attention... to hold up its end. You've felt this, of course. How many times have you sat in a lecture you really needed and wanted to pay attention to, but still found it hard to stay focused? Or how about the book you can't seem to stay awake for... finding yourself reading the same paragraph over and over because you keep tuning out--despite your best effort to stay with it?

But here's the coolest (and for me, the most fascinating) part of all this:

When you lecture or write using conversational language, your user's brain thinks it's in a REAL conversation!

In other words, if you use conversational language, the listener/reader's brain still thinks it has to hold up its end, so it pays more attention. It really is that simple, and that powerful (at least if you really want to help users pay attention and remember your message).

At least that the conclusion some researchers have come to, and you can read more about this in this book and this book. (Warning, that last book is by the guys responsible for Microsoft Bob, so... acquiring research and applying that research in a useful way can be very different).

For a long time, there was a rule (although nobody remembers who came up with it) that said computer books (unless they're "for dummies") must be written in a formal style. Possibly THE worst example of this for me was the editorial group at what was then Sun Educational Services--where the reasons for using formal language included:

1) It's professional. Formal language == professional. Conversational tone == unprofessional.

2) It's easier to localize.

3) It's more appropriate (whatever "appropriate" meant... we never knew for sure.)

I railed against #1 (one of the things that did, eventually, cost me my job there).

I also railed against #2, especially since it meant that in order to better localize, we'd need to suck out all remaining life that hadn't already been destroyed by reason #1.

It got so ridiculous that for a while that we were told not to use contractions, because "they don't localize well." While I'm sure they had valid reasons for making that claim, wow. My naive thinking is that anyone doing translations that can't deal with the contractions is going to have much bigger issues... and if they're using a machine-translation, YIKES! Even worse.

And here's the problem I have with not using contractions... what do science fiction writers do when they want to make sure you recognize (without being told) that a character is either:

a) a robot/android
or
b) an alien

Think about it. They don't use contractions. Dead giveaway every time. One of the only computer/AI characters who DID use contractions was Hal, and, well, he was psychotic. So I should qualify the rule as "non-psycho robots, androids, and aliens do not use contractions."

So here we were--in the interest of localization--stripping all remaining humanity out of the material.

But that's the extreme example, of course. It's quite easy to write in a formal, non-conversational tone and still use contractions. And it's that formal, non-conversational language that causes a reduction in comprehension and retention and recall. (There's good data on this in the "science of instruction" book I linked to earlier in this post).

If an author isn't forced by the editorial police to formalize the language, why, then, do so many still use it in their learning books? I've asked this question of a lot of authors, and it usually comes down to a violation of the"users shouldn't think about YOU" rule. In other words, the author is considering how he or she--the author--will be perceived. One author put it this way to me, "I want people to see me as the serious kind of person who says, 'listen up because I'm only going to say this once!', where YOU, on the other hand, want people to feel, "hey, let's have some fun!". When I said, "this is a problem... why?" He made the valid point that unlike us, he was using his books as a means to further his consulting career, so what people thought of HIM as the author really did matter.

It was kind of like, "I don't want people to see me as someone they'd like to have over for dinner. I want them to see me as someone they'd like to hire." The number of arguments I could make about that statement could go on for days, but that's a different topic.

Other arguments are that by making the language conversational, we're not showing the topic--and the readers--the proper respect. I'll let you consider that one.

Another argument is that using conversational language makes it sound like a "dummies" book. That's potentially valid, but only because the "dummies" series was the first to really make a format dedicated to NOT using formal language. As long as the perception is that "dummies/very beginning books use casual language but advanced books do not", then that's a problem. We're trying to change this in our part of the world by claiming that the opposite could be true--that the more advanced the topic, the more you NEED to pull out all the stops in trying to make it more understandable. And in fact, that's how it is with our books--because of our format, we're able to cover far more ground and dig into more advanced topics than a similar book using formal language.

I know this is horribly overgeneralized, but as a high-level rule, we believe:

If you're using formal language in a lecture, learning book (or marketing message, for that matter), you're worrying about how people perceive YOU. If you're thinking only about the USERS, on the other hand, you're probably using more conversational language.

Now, there are limits--and context DOES matter. How far you go in "conversational language" is a matter of culture and your audience. We use words that some believe are inappropriate in a technical book, including "sucks", and we wrote "wtf?" in the margin of one page. So far, we haven't used any four-letter words (although we'd occasionally like to), but our books have found their way into high school courses, and we haven't felt that the content needed or would benefit from those words.

But the research supports that you don't have to take it that far to get the benefits of "the brain tunes into conversational language because it thinks it's IN a conversation." Just rearranging a few words to be more casual and applying a readability index can help.

The tip we give our authors is this: when you're writing, paste up a couple pictures of real people, and imagine you're talking to them as opposed to writing for some abstract notion of "reader". Most importantly, ignore the advice your high school writing teacher gave you--that you must never "write the way you talk." Because from the brain's point of view, it is far better to write the way you talk. In fact, while it doesn't make for great writing to, say, print a transcript of a real conversation, that would still give you better learning material than something you wrote using passive, third-person voice in a formal tone.

And never underestimate the power of using "you" in your writing!