The science behind clear, concise communication.
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” - William Strunk Jr. in The Elements of Style.
William Strunk’s book was originally published in 1918, was revised and enlarged in 1959, and was named by Time in 2011 as one of the 100 most influential books published since 1923.
Two theories help explain why Strunk’s message still rings true today: Cognitive Load Theory and the Hick–Hyman Law (“Hick’s Law”). These theories are relevant for all types of communication to an audience: emails, signage, presentations, restaurant menus, retail store layouts, or social media posts. Cognitive Load Theory teaches us that we should only present the information needed to convey our key message to minimize the cognitive load. Hick’s Law teaches us that we should simplify the call to action in order to reduce the decision time for our recipients. Though these theories are especially relevant for anyone who communicates to an audience professionally, they are also useful for everyday communication, with colleagues or family and friends.
Cognitive Load Theory
First developed in the 1980s by John Sweller, Cognitive Load Theory describes the amount of information that working memory can hold at once. Sweller said that as we learn, information must be held in the working memory until it is sufficiently processed before passing into the long-term memory. Here, it is stored in knowledge structures called “schemas”. Schemas organize information according to how that information will be used.
The capacity of your working memory is very limited, so when too much information is presented, our working memory becomes overwhelmed and much of that information is lost.
When attention is divided between visual information like diagrams, labels, and explanatory text, cognitive load increases, and the brain’s ability to process the information is reduced. Each of us can relate to having read an extra-long email (or maybe even drafting one ourselves!). According to Cognitive Load Theory, our audience may not have processed the email effectively and our key message may have been missed. Or worse yet, that email sits in our inbox unread because it will take too much mental energy to look at it on a busy day. Learn more about great email drafting in B2B Cold Outreach Fundamentals and The Software CEO’s Guide to AI Outbound Sales.
Hick’s Law
Related to the Cognitive Load Theory, Hick’s Law, named after British and American psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the number of options presented. Think multiple buttons, links to other pages, or distracting non-essential imagery. Or perhaps you can relate to reading an extra-long restaurant menu, and how much longer it takes you to choose your meal. Hick’s Law is the reason we should stick to one key call-to-action if we aim to maximize response.
Increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.
Why This Matters More Now
These principles have become even more important in an era of AI-generated content. AI makes it easy to produce more: more words, more options, more slides, more emails. The cost of creating content has dropped to nearly zero, but the capacity of human attention has not changed. If anything, the flood of AI-generated noise makes concise, well-designed communication more valuable than it has ever been. The companies that win will not be the ones producing the most content. They will be the ones producing the clearest content.
Implementing these principles into our communication is always a challenge. At Quadshift, we apply these principles across everything we and our portfolio companies produce: websites, outbound campaigns, product interfaces, sales decks. AI has made producing more easier than ever, which makes the discipline of less more valuable, not less. The bias is always “less is more,” with one clear call-to-action per touchpoint. We test with colleagues before we send. Try this next time you are drafting any type of communication. Not only will you improve the odds that the message is processed and responded to, but your recipients will also thank you.
