CROSSPOST: JOSH BERNHOFF (2019): Why Books Work: A Rebuttal to Andy Matuschak
Andy Matuschak says: if you can't explain a book's ideas when someone questions you, you never really absorbed them. But readers keep in their minds’ forefronts a book's strongest principles, the few side ideas that matter for their own work, and some memorable details. Plus much of the rest sits quietly until a situation calls it up. But those books that do the best are those books that encourage—that in fact make it almost impossible to avoid—deep reading practices:
Bernhoff says, à propos of Andy Matuschak (2019) , “Why Books Donʼt Work “<https://andymatuschak.org/books/>, that a successful nonfiction book is a layered production, and that:
Strong principles stick.
Supporting arguments matter less, because you don’t have to see the framing to know the building stands.
Readers keep the subsidiary ideas that are relevant to them.
Vivid bits, especially stories, are remembered.
out of the sum total of the architecture of strong principles, supporting arguments, subsidiary ideas, and hundreds of “bits” of facts, statistics, diagrams, and stories. For:
It’s amazing what’s hiding in your head, waiting for the moment that it becomes relevant…
But, he also says, writers have an obligation to write good books: Address the reader to break the frame and break up a lulling flow. Tell stories. Shouldn’t authors ask rhetorical questions. Vary the format. Present the same information in different modes: text paragraphs, heading and bullet-list summaries, and graphics. Introduce and sum up:
Josh Bernhoff:
CROSSPOST: JOSH BERNHOFF (2019): Why Books Work: A Rebuttal to Andy Matuschak
<https://bernoff.com/blog/why-books-work-a-rebuttal-to-andy-matuschak> <https://bernoff.com/blog>
ByJosh BernoffMay 24, 2019
Andy Matuschak wrote a thoughtful piece called “Why books don’t work.” I think he’s a bit off-target. But his arguments will get you thinking about how your book can work better.
If you’re an author with any capability for introspection, Matuschak’s essay ought to make you think. Here’s some of what he wrote:
And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. This last idea so invisibly defines the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken.
Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences? I’ll be honest: it happens to me regularly. Often things go well at first. I’ll feel I can sketch the basic claims, paint the surface; but when someone asks a basic probing question, the edifice instantly collapses. Sometimes it’s a memory issue: I simply can’t recall the relevant details. But just as often, as I grasp about, I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea in question, though I’d certainly thought I understood when I read the book. Indeed, I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment. . . .
All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it. . . .
Like lectures, books have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation, but the medium does have an implicit model. And like lectures, that model is transmissionism. Sequences of words in sequences of lines in sequences of pages, the form of a book suggests people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. In caricature: “The author describes an idea in words on the page; the reader reads the words; then the reader understands the idea. When the reader reaches the last page, they’ve finished the book.” Of course, most authors don’t believe that people learn things this way, but because the medium makes the assumption invisible, it’s hard to question. . . .
I take this critique seriously. Matuschak posits that what is essentially a written lecture — a bunch of sentences strung together — makes it difficult for the a readers to acquire and then internalize what they are supposed to be learning. And when a book is no more than a bunch of declarative sentences, he may be right.
Why books are better than Matuschak thinks
Let’s go back to Matuschak’s test of whether a book hits home: when asked, can you recall and spit back the thesis and elements of a book?
Even if you can’t, that doesn’t mean those ideas aren’t in there. The inability to articulate them aloud is not the same as not having retained much.
Think about what non-fiction books are made out of.
They include overarching principles. Matuschak and I agree, if those are any good, people retain them.
There are the arguments that support those principles. Sometimes people retain those arguments, sometimes they don’t. But you don’t have to see the framing to understand how the building stays up. I’d argue that retaining the arguments is less important.
There are subsidiary ideas. A good book has lots of those. And a reader is going to recall those subsidiary ideas only to the extent that they are relevant for her. If there are 15 subsidiary ideas and three are relevant for you, those three may be sufficient. If a book is really useful, you may retain more.
There are also, in any given book, hundreds of bits of knowledge. There are facts, statistics, diagrams, and, crucially, stories. There are long case-study stories and short “for example” stories. When the author chooses these bits and delivers them well, the reader retains them.
For example, readers of Writing Without Bullshit may quote back to me that 81% of business readers say that poorly written material wastes a lot of their time. Or they may remind me of the story about the 1,100-word email that Microsoft’s Stephen Elop wrote, the one that buried the lede — 12,500 job cuts — 80% of the way through.
The last thing to remember is that even if you can’t spit something back, it may still be in there. People who read my book may be able to tell you to put the most important information up front, but they may not recall the specific technique — cut opening paragraphs until you find one that you can’t cut — until they actually need it. It’s amazing what’s hiding in your head, waiting for the moment that it becomes relevant.
Making your book better
I agree with Matuschak that when a book is a lecture, delivered from on high by the almighty expert to the poor ignorant plebes that are reading it, it probably won’t be retained well.
So don’t write this way.
Here are some simple tricks to make your book useful and make its ideas stick.
Write directly to the reader, using the words I and you. When people see prose directed at them, they sit up and take notice. You should talk to your boss about this, for example, or I’ll repeat this since it’s going to change the way you work forever. Writers trained on academic prose never think of this technique, because academics rarely write this way — they’re in almighty expert mode. But if you want people to retain what’s in your book, you have to adopt this tone.
Tell stories. People retain stories. The more relevant stories you have, the more they will retain.
Ask rhetorical questions. This makes the reader think and wonder if they’re getting it. It wakes them up from the litany of declarative sentences.
Include graphics. Put the same information in text, in headings, and in graphics. Most people retain pictures better than words. Everyone retains information presented in several different forms better than information presented in only one form.
Vary presentation. Use quotes, links, heading, subheadings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, tables, and anything else that breaks up the march of sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. This keeps the reader engaged and makes it easier to scan the book and understand its structure.
Introduce and sum up. As the saying goes, “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.” To reinforce ideas, prepare people for what they are about to read before they get there. When it comes to summing up, a great tip is to include a bulleted list of takeaways — things you can actually do differently based on what you read. That makes readers more likely retain it.
This is not a complete list, but you get the idea. Work a little harder on using all the capabilities of writing, not just a dictated lecture, and you’ll improve retention. Here’s how I’d restate Matuschak’s thesis: The problem is not that books don’t work, it’s that lazy, boring books don’t work.
If you follow my advice, you’ll get a bonus, too. When people retain the ideas in a book, they talk about it. When they talk about it, other people hear about it and read it — and the book becomes more influential and successful. That’s what you’re aiming for, isn’t it?
<https://bernoff.com/blog/why-books-work-a-rebuttal-to-andy-matuschak> <https://bernoff.com/blog>
Brad DeLong here: Bernhoff is a business-writing coach.
Bernhoff believes that the medium of the book is fine, and that fault lies with lazy, lecture-style authors (and editors!). Plus he believes that readers keep far more than they can recite on command. Recite-on-command is not how we recall knowledge. Retention is selective and latent. Plus good writing technique raises retention substantially.
Now Bernhoff is, I think, answering a question different from the one Matuschak asked. Matuschak’s call is to build a new medium to fight the assumption of “transmissionism”, that people learn via absorbing knowledge by reading sentences linearly. Bernhoff replies by saying that rhetoric has an at least 3000 year-old history of techniques to fight “transmissionism” in its arsenal.
It is true. There are good things: talk to the reader, tell stories, ask rhetorical questions, add graphics, tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, and tell ‘em what you told ‘em. These are all very good things! But even granting them all, Bernhoff misses Matuschak’s sharpest point. Matuschak’s complaint is not just that he forgets details. It is that when someone asks a basic probing question, he discovers he never really understood the idea in the first place, and never noticed. Vivid stories and rhetorical questions may well help a reader recall the memorable bits. Engagement, however, is not understanding, and a failure of comprehension is not a failure of memory.
Bernoff focuses on the author, not on the reader. Thus he misses the cognitive science of retrieval practice, spaced repetition, query-and-response, bringing in of additional information and the burden of self-monitoring, the “metacognition” that successful deep-reading requires. His principles for writing encourage these. But he does not look at what happens after the author finishes their work. It is Matuschak who offers advice to the reader here:
Readers can’t just read the words. They have to really think about them. Maybe take some notes. Discuss with others. Write an essay in response. Like a lecture, a book is a warmup for the thinking that happens later. Great: that’s a better model! Let’s look at how it plays out…. [The] people [who] do absorb knowledge from books… [have]inner monologues… like: “This idea reminds me of…,” “This point conflicts with…,” “I don’t really understand how…,” etc…. Unfortunately, these tactics don’t come easily…. These skills fall into a bucket which learning science calls “metacognition.” The experimental evidence suggests that it’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them…. Worse, even if readers know how to do all these things, the process is quite taxing…
Bernhoff’s essay would, I think, be more effective with an explicit bridge from what the author does, rhetorically, to what the reader needs to do, metacognitively.
Note, too, that Bernhoff’s model case is the practical business book, where the point is to remember three relevant tips and know where to look up the rest. Matuschak’s examples were The Selfish Gene, Thinking, Fast & Slow, and Guns, Germs, & Steel: dense explanatory works whose whole principal value lies in the reader genuinely understanding a causal argument.
There, perhaps, different rules apply. There, perhaps, Matuschak’s worries (and hopes for new technology-enable media) apply much more significantly.