The Cognitive Architecture of a Solid Draft
Writing anything requires making assumptions about the readers.
To respect your reader, you have to assume they are smart and capable enough to pick up certain things without being told outright, and that they’re good-faith readers, AKA they won’t become distracted by counterarguments for every subpoint.
You have to get into the readers’ minds while leaving enough space to create lil pockets of joy, wonder, awe, fear...the whole gambit of human emotion and presence.
Readers begin building a mental model of your story from the very first page, mostly based on your voice.
And the architecture of voice involves, at the very least:
Conceptual Hierarchy
Point of View
Evidence
Transitions
Sentence Design
Conceptual Hierarchy: The PB&J Experiment
Conceptual hierarchy deals with the relationship between concepts and all the ways they connect together.
When the author carefully fits ideas together in a logical order (not necessarily linearly either!!!), that’s called scaffolding.
Do you need to know these technical terms to be a gr8 writer? Absolutely not, but I am a big fan of words, their theory, and ya know…writing.
Anywho, I am reminded of a classic 90’s kid school exercise where we all had to write out the instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Most of us completely biffed it at the time because our tiny brains thought too quickly and too short-sightedly.
You cannot start with, “Spread the peanut butter on the bread.”
First, you need to grab a slice of bread.
Actually…first you need to open the bread bag.
And even before that, you need to acquire bread and alllll the supplies.
Then grab a slice. Open the peanut butter. Find a knife.*
(*Unless you want to smear it with your fingers, which is technically an option but changes the entire tone of the procedure.)
We all knew how to make the sandwich so well that our brains skipped steps.
Writers do the same thing constantly.
We know the topic, so we forget which ideas depend on earlier ones. We introduce a concept before defining the thing underneath it. Or we go too far in the other direction and explain every obvious step because we are terrified the reader might miss something or be upset with us.
Neither approach respects the reader much.
A generous draft provides the reader with sufficient context, slows down around unfamiliar or delicate ideas, and then gets out of the way.
A draft that respects the reader asks:
What can they safely infer on their own?
Which details are structural, and which are just interesting?
Am I explaining this because it matters or because I am nervous about being misunderstood?
POV: You Love Your Readers
Point of view is usually taught as first person, second person, and third person.
But in a real draft, point of view is also the position you are writing from.
What do you actually know? What do you care about? How much certainty have you earned? How close are you standing to the thing you are describing?
If I write about a classroom I taught in for a few years, I have one kind of access. If I write about a classroom from a national dataset, I have another. Neither is automatically better, but they let me say different things.
Access might come from lived experience, interviews, observation, records, research, data, memory, or expertise.
Then there are the stakes.
If I am writing about bulldogs as companions, I probably care about temperament, routines, affection, weird habits, and their particular breed of zoomies.
If I am writing about bulldog health, suddenly breathing, mobility, breeding practices, and temperature matter a heck of a lot more.
…Which brings us to certainty.
If I look outside and see a blue jay on the fence, I can confidently say there is a blue jay on the fence. If it starts calling loudly when another bird approaches the feeder, I can describe that behavior too.
But the second I write the blue jay is territorial, I have moved from observation into interpretation.
Now, readers begin looking for evidence that supports their confidence in our judgment.
Then there’s emotional distance.
You can stand very close to a subject and write from inside it. You can step back and analyze it. You can revisit something years later with enough distance to finally see what was happening.
Simple POV checks:
What do I actually have access to here?
What am I interpreting rather than directly knowing?
What feels at stake to me, and is that visible on the page?
Does my certainty match the evidence I actually have?
Am I close enough to the subject to understand its texture?
Am I far enough away to see the larger pattern?
Evidence: Give the Page Some Texture
Evidence is usually associated with research papers, citations, statistics, and Very Serious Academic Things™, but I think about it more broadly.
Evidence gives the reader something to encounter.
Numbers, quotes, documents, examples, observations…they’re all evidence because they make abstract ideas more visible.
If I tell you a classroom was chaotic, you understand the word chaotic.
If I tell you that by third period, the students had snapped half of their pencils, and the teacher’s face warped into someone sucking on the sourest lemon known to man…well, now you have something to work with.
You get to see the evidence and participate in the conclusion.
That’s the magic of texture.
Humans are especially good at constructing meaning from sensory information, which gives writers five extremely convenient little portals into a scene:
Sight: color, movement, distance, shape, expression, light
Sound: volume, rhythm, silence, interruption, tone
Touch: temperature, pressure, weight, texture, pain
Smell: smoke, rain, perfume, antiseptic, old books, somebody microwaving fish in the office kitchen
Taste: sweetness, bitterness, salt, metal, spice
You do not need all five.
Examples:
“The apartment was neglected” gives me the conclusion.
BUT “Three final notices sat unopened beneath a pile of takeout menus” gives me evidence.
“She was nervous” tells me what to think.
BUT “She chewed the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood” gives me something I can feel.
Sensory evidence is only one way to create texture.
Numbers give us scale.
Quotes give us language.
Objects give us material evidence.
Examples give us specific cases.
Research gives us patterns beyond our own experience.
Observations give us behavior.
Each one answers some version of the same question:
What can I put on the page that gives the reader a reason to believe, imagine, recognize, or understand what I am saying?
The answer also depends on your point of view.
Remember our blue jay.
If I write that the blue jay is territorial, I have made an interpretation. Now I might show you that it repeatedly chased smaller birds from the feeder. I might consult research about territorial behavior in blue jays. I might describe the calls I heard immediately before another bird flew away.
Different evidence supports different levels of certainty.
And this is where writing gets fun because sometimes, one oddly specific fact does more work than three paragraphs of explanation.
A hospital does not necessarily become more real because I describe every machine in the room. Maybe what matters is the paper cup with somebody's name misspelled on it.
A recession does not become understandable because I throw twelve economic indicators at you. Maybe one of those indicators establishes the scale, then a grocery receipt shows what the change actually feels like inside somebody's Tuesday.
Evidence can zoom out. Evidence can zoom in. A gr8 writer knows when to do each.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy evidence checks:
Where am I asking the reader to accept a conclusion without showing them what produced it?
Where have I stayed abstract for too long?
Would a sensory detail help the reader experience this idea?
Would a number, example, quote, observation, or source make its scale or meaning clearer?
Am I choosing details because they reveal something or because I happen to know them?
Transitions: “However” Cannot Save a Bad Relationship
Now we have ideas, structure, and evidence, but they still need to move.
Most of us learned these transitions in elementary school:
however
therefore
furthermore
meanwhile
consequently
They’re quite useful words for essays but not necessarily readership because they’re terrible substitute for logic.
A transition works because two ideas actually have a relationship. The word merely helps the reader identify it.
That relationship might involve contrast, cause and effect, qualification, chronology, comparison, continuation, example, consequence, or a shift from general principle to specific case.
Cohesion refers to the visible linguistic connections between parts of a text.
Coherence refers to whether the underlying ideas make sense together.
So, take the following example:
Dogs need regular exercise. However, Saturn has rings.
The word “however” creates a tiny bit of surface cohesion, but it cannot explain why we have suddenly left the dog and entered space.
Some transition problems are simply impossible to fix at the sentence level. Writers keep trying moreover, on the other hand, in contrast, similarly, and every other little bridge word available. But the paragraph still feels wrong. Sometimes there is no bridge because the roads do not connect.
When that happens, ask: Why does this idea come next?
Try to answer in plain language.
“Because the second paragraph gives an example of the first.”
“Because this introduces an exception.”
“Because we have explained the problem and can now evaluate a response.”
“Because both concepts depend on the same assumption.”
If you can name the relationship, the transition usually becomes much easier to write.
If you cannot, you may have found an ordering problem rather than a wording problem.
Sentence Design: Make the Reader Carry Less
Eventually, we get all the way down to the sentence.
Sentence problems are satisfying because you can see the clunky bit, move it around, or delete a word, and it feels productive. BUT…huge but…readers do not experience your writing as you do. They just keep receiving entirely NEW information from you, sentence by sentence, and trying to hang onto enough of it to understand whatever comes next.
That takes working memory.
Working memory is the small amount of information we can actively hold in our heads at once.
Cognitive load describes how much mental effort that information requires.
Which means every sentence makes the reader carry something.
Syntax is the arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses inside a sentence.
Change the arrangement and you can make the same information much easier or much more annoying to carry.
Compare:
Researchers identified an anomaly in the survey data. The anomaly appeared most strongly among first-year respondents.
with:
Among first-year respondents was the strongest manifestation of an anomaly first identified by researchers in the survey data.
The second is alphabet soup. By the time I figure out what happened, I have already picked up first-year respondents, strongest manifestation, anomaly, researchers, and survey data and am wandering around looking for somewhere to put them.
The first version gives me the anomaly first. Cool. Got it. Now tell me something new about it.
That follows a linguistic principle called the given-new principle.
Readers tend to have an easier time when familiar information gives them somewhere to attach the unfamiliar stuff coming next.
You do not need to make every sentence tiny.
You just do not want to hand somebody six grocery bags and then remember there is also a watermelon in the trunk.
Word order matters for emphasis too.
English tends to put a little extra weight at the end of a sentence.
Compare:
The committee rejected the proposal because it would cost nearly twice the original estimate.
with:
Because it would cost nearly twice the original estimate, the committee rejected the proposal.
Same information, but I leave the first sentence thinking about the money and the second thinking about the rejection.
Syntax is doing the actual work here.
None of this means long sentences are bad either, btw.
I love a long sentence when it has somewhere to go.
I just do not want to carry half of it around waiting for the other half to explain why I picked it up.
The IKEA Test
The drafting process is a lot like assembling furniture.
You usually do not need new materials. You need to stop staring at the drawer front and look at the whole dresser.
Before you start replacing perfectly good sentences, check whether the parts are in the right places.
“Bad” writing is often an architecture problem, and that means the draft is figureoutable.
The Gr8 Writing team is pretty good at finding the mystery screw, btw. ;)
