A briefing tells you what to conclude. A book gives you enough to conclude it yourself. Most nonfiction is written as a briefing. The chapter states its point, supports the point, and restates the point, and the reader agrees three times without ever having done anything. Then two weeks later they can’t tell you what was in it.
The books people quote back to me years later all have one thing in common. They left something for the reader to do.
Over-explaining is the habit I fight hardest in manuscripts, my own included, and I think it’s a failure of nerve. The writer doesn’t trust the reader, so the writer says everything twice, and the reader walks away with nothing of their own. The book gets forgotten, and the author never figures out why nobody recommends it.
Why does pre-digested writing fail to stick?
Because retention follows effort, and there was no effort.
When a reader assembles a conclusion from evidence you supplied, the conclusion is partly theirs. They remember it as something they worked out, a much stronger form of memory than something they were told, and they’ll repeat it to other people as their own view.
Hand them the same conclusion directly and they dismiss it as your opinion. Filed opinions don’t survive contact with the next book.
I’d rather a reader argue with me in their head than nod along and forget me by the weekend. Agreement the reader didn’t work for leaves no trace, and a book built on it has wasted everybody’s evening.
The mechanism isn’t mysterious and almost nobody writes as though they believe it, because handing over the conclusion feels like clarity and withholding it feels like being difficult.
The book on this: Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe gives the reader the evidence and stops. That’s harder to write than the explaining version.
What does leaving work look like in practice?
Stopping one step short, on purpose, at the point where the reader can take the step themselves. You give the situation, the specifics, and the thing that makes it odd. Then you stop. The reader closes the gap. It matters that the gap is small enough to be closeable, because a gap too wide is just an unfinished argument.
In Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe I describe somebody demanding peer-reviewed evidence for a medical treatment while accepting a blurry video as proof of magnetism. I don’t then write a paragraph explaining that this is inconsistent. The reader has it before the sentence ends, and that they got there first is why the example lands.
Write that paragraph and the example becomes an illustration of a point instead of the point arriving in the reader.
The book on this: Family Cybersecurity shows the reasoning and states the instructions plainly, the split this piece argues for.
Does leaving gaps work for practical instruction?
Less, and knowing where it stops applying is the whole skill.
Nobody wants a puzzle when they’re trying to configure a router or decide which publishing platform to use. Instruction should be direct, ordered, and free of anything the reader has to work out. Withholding there is obstruction. I’m tired of instructions written as riddles, where the writer gets to look clever and the reader’s left with a router that still doesn’t work.
The place for the technique is the reasoning: why this matters, what it means and what follows from it. Those are the parts a reader should build. The procedure gets none of it, and when the practical section arrives it should be as plain as you can make it.
Family Cybersecurity does both in the same chapter. The reasoning about why security fails at the human seam is shown instead of announced. The list of what to do first is direct, ordered and boring on purpose.
| Part of the book | Approach |
|---|---|
| Reasoning: why it matters, what follows | Leave it for the reader to build |
| Examples | Give the situation, the specifics and the odd detail, then stop |
| Procedures and instructions | Direct, ordered and plain, with nothing to work out |
| The conclusion | State it once, at the end of a section, after the reader could arrive |
| The sentence after the good sentence | Cut it, along with phrases like “in other words” |
How do you know if you are over-explaining?
Look for the sentence after the good sentence.
Writers produce a line that works, then get nervous and add another explaining what it meant. The second sentence is nearly always the problem. It’s the writer checking that the reader understood, and its effect is to tell the reader they weren’t trusted.
Read a chapter and mark every sentence that restates the previous one in flatter language. Most drafts have one every few paragraphs. Cutting them makes the prose sharper and hands a great deal back to the reader in a single pass.
The other tell is the phrase that announces a conclusion. In other words. What this means is. The lesson here is. Each of those is a signal that you’re about to do the reader’s work, and the material underneath is usually strong enough not to need it.
The book on this: The Death of Thinking is 29 chapters on what happens to judgment when somebody else does the thinking, at a larger scale than one book.
What if some readers miss the point entirely?
Some will, and the trade is worth it.
I’d rather a reader argue with me in their head than nod along and forget me by the weekend.
This is the objection every writer has and it’s a real cost. A reader who doesn’t close the gap gets less from the chapter than if you’d spelled it out. That happens. What you get in exchange is that everybody else gets considerably more, and the book builds a reputation as one that treats people as capable. Writing for the reader who would miss it means writing down to everybody, and readers can feel that within a page even when they can’t name it.
There’s a middle option. Say it plainly once, at the end of a section instead of the start, after the reader has already had the chance to arrive.
The ones who got there feel confirmed. The ones who didn’t get a second route in, and nobody has been told the answer before they had a chance at it.
My take
Leave the last step to the reader. Give the evidence in the right order and let them reach the conclusion, because people keep what they worked for. Delete the signpost lines that announce the point before the reader gets there. Some readers will miss it, and that’s a fair trade. If you’re nervous, say it straight once at the end of the section, after they’ve had a chance to get there.
How do you make a business book the reader participates in?
Leaving work for the reader turns a summary into an argument the reader participates in. Business books are the worst offenders because the format encourages it. Every chapter announces its takeaway, delivers three supporting points, and closes with the takeaway again. The reader has been walked through a slide deck, and I think the publishers and coaches who push that template are selling executives books nobody will remember a month later.
The version that works gives the reader a situation they recognize, shows what happened, and trusts them to see the principle. Then the principle can be named, once, without being repeated in the summary box.
If you want the neighboring pieces, why your book needs your stories and how to structure a thought leadership book both sit next to this one. The Writing Hub has the rest of the craft material, and my ghostwriting service spends a lot of its time removing the sentence after the good sentence. I think a writer who spells out every conclusion is wasting the reader’s time and throwing away the book’s one real chance to change somebody’s mind, and I’d cut that sentence every time.
When you tell, readers get your conclusions, and when you show, they work it out from the evidence. My book Show Don’t Tell explains the difference with over a hundred before and after examples.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Semantic Memory and the Generation Effect: Some Tests of the Lexical Activation Hypothesis, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
