Sign posting: How to reduce cognitive load for your reader
Sign posting: How to reduce cognitive load for your readerWhen you're sharing complex ideas or writing long memos, use sign posting to guide your reader.
👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share frameworks for becoming a sharper marketer, founder, and operator, rooted in my experience as an a16z-backed founder. In this week’s newsletter, you’ll learn a simple writing technique that will make your messages easier to skim and more fun to read.
Read time: 5 minutes As knowledge workers, we spend an enormous amount of time communicating. This is why I believe one of the most thoughtful, selfless things you can do on a daily basis is reduce cognitive load in your writing. Your recipient shouldn’t have to decipher, guess, ask, follow up, parse through, or clarify what you meant because you sent a poorly-written Slack message. Writing clearly is even higher stakes for longer memos where you have multiple important ideas to convey, but your message might be at risk of being visually unappealing, hard to skim, and overwhelming when you most need your recipient to stay engaged. So how do you write more clearly if you’re sharing complex ideas that require nuance that’s hard to explain, without spending twice as much time drafting your memo? Enter: sign posting. What is sign posting?Sign posting is using key words, phrases, or an overall structure in your writing to signal what the rest of your post is about. Sign posting helps your reader quickly get grounded, so their brain doesn’t waste cycles wondering where you’re taking them. You can use sign posting throughout your writing:
With sign posting, you add information hierarchy without relying on rich text formatting, although rich text formatting is a type of sign posting in itself. For example, Paul Graham primarily uses plain text in his essays, but each paragraph has a clear topic sentence. Topic sentences are a type of sign posting. The main benefit of sign posting is it makes your writing more skimmable—it makes longer writing feel shorter and faster-paced. This increases the chances your recipient will actually read your whole document and take action. List of my favorite sign posting wordsSign posting words, or transition words/phrases, serve as connective tissue between ideas. Does one idea flow to another? Does X happen despite or because of Y? I’m sure there’s an official grammatical term for transition or connector words, but for our purposes, I’m more interested in the practical application of this concept in daily business writing. Here’s a list of sign posting words I personally use regularly:
These words can kick off paragraphs, or be used within a paragraph. And they pop when your reader is skimming, which makes your writing easier to consume. These phrases aren't the only way to sign post, but they illustrate the concept and are a good way to get started. When sign posting is most valuableSign posting isn’t only about sentence structure. It’s about your underlying logic. Using sign posting can help you think more clearly. A structure like “Up until now, we X. Going forward, we will Y” can turn a vague, abstract notion into a concrete, articulate idea that more clearly draws a line in the sand. Show the emotional subtext. Have you ever read a note and thought, “Wait, is this good news or bad news?” I often read memos where the leader intended to share positive news, but the way it was written sounded ominous. Make sure to control for the emotional subtext. For example, I might sign post by saying “Good news: X” or use a few positive key words that pop. You should sign post verbally too. Sign posting is even more valuable when you’re speaking out loud because your listener can’t pause and reread, or zoom out to see the high-level structure of a two-page document. They’re listening to you, word by word, reveal the two pages of material. This can make folks feel impatient and out of control—unless you use sign posting. For example, if you’re drafting scripts for marketing or in-product videos, sign posting can make your videos clearer. At Maven, this was one of the principles that made the biggest difference for helping my team create strong scripts quickly.
If you're recording an internal Loom video for coworkers on how you improved the product flow, you can give a verbal outline of what’s to come:
A good rule of thumb: The simpler your underlying ideas, the less you need to sign post. The more complex your ideas, or the lengthier your writing, the more you should consider it. I’d love to get your help growing our community of thoughtful, rigorous operators. If you enjoyed this post, consider taking a moment to:
Thanks for being here, PS If you liked this, follow me on LinkedIn where I post bite-sized insights. PPS See you next Wednesday at 8am ET. If you want to binge-read, check out these recent essays: |
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