Why the more you know, the harder you are to understand — and the language that breaks the spell.
Lesson 1 of The Art of Being Understood · see all five lessons →
Read each part, then pause for the questions. The whole idea turns on one number.
In 1990, a graduate student at Stanford named Elizabeth Newton ran a deceptively simple game. She divided people into two roles: "tappers" and "listeners". Each tapper was given a list of twenty-five famously recognisable songs — "Happy Birthday", a national anthem — and asked to tap out the rhythm of one of them on a table with their fingers. The listener's job was simply to name the tune.
Before the listener guessed, the tapper was asked to predict the odds: out of every hundred listeners, how many would get it right? Tappers were confident. On average they expected a success rate of around fifty per cent.
The listeners identified the songs correctly two and a half per cent of the time — three out of a hundred and twenty.
The reason is almost physical. As the tapper taps, they cannot help hearing the full song — the melody, the words, the orchestration — playing in their head. The listener hears none of that. They hear a sequence of disconnected knocks on wood. And here is the cruel part: the tapper cannot switch the music off, and so cannot imagine what it is like not to hear it. To them, the listener who cannot name "Happy Birthday" seems almost wilfully obtuse.
What the tappers suffered from has a name. Economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber called it, in 1989, the curse of knowledge: once you know something, you can no longer reconstruct what it was like not to know it. Your own expertise becomes a kind of blindness. You cannot see the gap between you and the person you are talking to, because the knowledge that would let you see it is the very thing they lack.
Every expert is a tapper. The specialist hears the full structure of an idea — the assumptions beneath it, the steps that connect it, the examples that anchor it. The audience hears jargon-knocks on a table. And the curse has a vicious arithmetic: the more expert you become, the wider the gap grows, and the less visible it is to you. Deep knowledge does not announce that it is being lost on people. It quietly assumes it is being understood.
This is not a problem of intelligence or effort. It is a problem of language — of the specific, learnable moves that translate what an expert knows into what a non-expert can follow. The curse cannot be cured. But, sentence by sentence, it can be broken.
The curse shows up in language in four recurring ways. Learn to spot them and you are halfway to breaking them.
1. Unglossed jargon. A technical term is used as if its meaning were obvious — because, to the expert, it is. 2. Compression. Steps that feel trivial to the expert are skipped entirely, so the logic jumps. 3. Assumed schema. The speaker takes for granted a whole background of prior knowledge the listener does not have. 4. Unanchored abstraction. Big abstract nouns pile up with no concrete example to hold on to — and the listener, with nothing to picture, quietly drifts away.
The vocabulary of explaining well. These are the words you need to talk about clarity — the metalanguage of the expert communicator. Tap each card for a precise definition and a usable example.
One claim, told three ways. Notice that only the register changes; the content is identical.
| Register | The same idea |
|---|---|
| Cursed (expert-to-expert) | "Retrieval-induced facilitation is contingent upon the spacing of encoding episodes." |
| Hedged academic | "The evidence suggests that we remember things better when we space our study sessions out over time." |
| Accessible (with an anchor) | "Cram for one night and it's gone by Friday. Study a little each day and it sticks. Spreading it out is what makes it last." |
These are not beginner's tricks. They are the precision tools of a C2 communicator: the difference between English that is correct and English that lands. Try each before you reveal the model answers.
The single biggest cause of opaque English is the abstract noun. "The facilitation of recall" hides a perfectly clear verb: "helps you remember". Find the buried verb and let it act. Rewrite each sentence so a person does something.
1. "The implementation of the intervention resulted in a reduction in participant anxiety."
2. "There is a dependence of memory consolidation upon the attainment of sufficient sleep."
3. "Our expectation is that the provision of concrete examples will lead to an improvement in comprehension."
4. "The avoidance of jargon is a contributor to the accessibility of an explanation."
1. "When we ran the intervention, participants felt less anxious." (implementation → ran; reduction → less)
2. "Your memory only settles if you sleep enough." (consolidation → settles; attainment → get)
3. "We expect that giving concrete examples will help people understand." (provision → giving; improvement → help understand)
4. "If you avoid jargon, more people can follow you." (avoidance → avoid; accessibility → can follow)
The move: ask "who does what?" of every abstract noun, and rebuild the sentence around that.
Take a term and walk it down a ladder: technical → plain → vivid. The skill is knowing how far down to go for this audience. Ladder each term in two more rungs.
1. cognitive load → the mental effort a task demands →
2. confirmation bias → →
3. statistically significant → →
1. cognitive load → the mental effort a task demands → "how hard your brain is having to work right now".
2. confirmation bias → our tendency to notice evidence that fits what we already believe → "we hear the 'yes' and somehow miss the 'no'".
3. statistically significant → unlikely to be just chance → "if it were a fluke, we'd be very surprised to see a result this big". (Note: a classic false friend — "significant" here means 'probably not random', NOT 'important'.)
The move: never assume the bottom rung is "dumbing down". It's translation.
An abstraction with no example is a knock on a table. Drop a concrete instance the moment you introduce an idea: "for instance…", "think of…", "it's the difference between X and Y". Anchor each abstract idea below with a single concrete example or analogy.
1. Anchor "diminishing returns" in one everyday example:
2. Build an analogy for "working memory has a limited capacity":
1. "The first coffee of the morning transforms you; the fourth does almost nothing." / "The first hour of study teaches you loads; the fifth, barely anything."
2. "Working memory is like a tiny desk: you can only spread out three or four papers at once — pile on a fifth and one slides off." / "…like a juggler who can keep four balls up, but throw in a fifth and they all drop."
The move: the best anchor is one the listener has lived. Reach for the kitchen, the commute, the body — not another abstraction.
At C2, precision is partly about saying exactly how sure you are — no more, no less. Overstating ("this proves") destroys trust as surely as understating. Choose the phrasing that matches the strength of the claim.
1. A single small study, not yet replicated: "This that…"
2. Decades of converging evidence: "We that…"
3. A plausible mechanism, untested: "It be that…"
1. "This hints / tentatively suggests that…" (weak claim, weak hedge)
2. "We now know / can be confident that…" (strong evidence earns a strong verb)
3. "It may / might well be that…" (a possibility, flagged as such)
The move: match the verb to the evidence. "Suggests", "indicates", "shows", "proves" are a ladder of certainty — choose the right rung honestly.
Metadiscourse guides the listener through the structure so they never have to ask "wait, where are we?". Keep a bank of these ready and reach for them out loud.
Here is one explanation, twice. Read the cursed version, then watch the five moves dismantle it.
"The phenomenon of spaced repetition leverages the spacing effect, whereby the distribution of retrieval practice across temporally separated intervals optimises the durability of long-term retention relative to massed presentation, as a function of the reconsolidation dynamics of the engram."
"Here's a useful trick for remembering things. (signpost) Imagine you've got five hours to learn something. (anchor) You could do all five in one go the night before — cramming. (plain) Or you could do one hour a day for five days. (plain) The surprising part is that the second way wins, every time. (signpost) Each time you come back and pull the memory up again after a gap, it settles a little deeper — like a path through grass that gets clearer the more often you walk it. (analogy) The science is solid on this. (calibrated) So: don't cram — space it out."
Same finding. The content was never the problem.
Now move to the last tab. Everything above is about to be tested out loud.
Do all four, in order. The first warms up the idea; the rest put the toolkit under pressure. The timer is there to stop you escaping into vagueness — fill the time with precision instead.
Before anything else, explain the curse of knowledge in your own words, as if to an intelligent colleague who missed today's session. Cover the tappers experiment, what the curse actually is, and why expertise makes it worse.
Use at least five of the Key Language terms (jargon, schema, to gloss, to hedge, signposting, nominalisation…) — and notice, as you do, whether you can resist becoming a tapper yourself.
Choose a genuinely difficult idea from a field you know well. Explain it to a smart non-specialist twice:
First, deliberately cursed — dense, nominalised, jargon-heavy, no examples. Then the same idea de-cursed, running it through the five moves: de-nominalise, ladder the register, anchor with an example or analogy, calibrate your certainty, signpost throughout.
The goal is to feel the difference in your own mouth — and to prove the content never had to change.
Take any one abstract or technical term and walk it down the ladder out loud — three rungs: technical definition → plain paraphrase → a vivid, lived example or analogy. Then do a second term, faster.
Push the bottom rung as far as it will go without losing the meaning. That bottom rung is where most explanations never reach.