I thought it was just me.
When Iām trying to share something Iāve read or heard with friends, I get really fuzzy on specifics. I remember the gist, but not the detail.
This has a name: the verbatim effect.
In 1967, Jacqueline Sachs had people listen to passages, then played them a sentence from the passage and asked whether it had changed.
Straight after hearing it, they could tell if the wording had been altered. But after less than a minute more listening, they couldnāt. The āsurface structureā had faded.
What they did remember was the meaning. The gist.
So words fade but meaning stays. But where does that meaning come from?
Not just from how articulate we are. It also comes from how it feels to take in.
We usually think āmakes senseā means āis understandableā.
But sense is also sensory.
How does it sound? Does it flow? Does it have rhythm and variety? Does it invite the readerās imagination, or is it clunky and hard work?
That feeling shapes the meaning people walk away with.
This is called processing fluency. When something is easy to take in, weāre more likely to like it and to believe it.
In one study, for example, people rated āwoes unite foesā as more accurate than āwoes unite enemiesā. And companies with easy-to-pronounce names have been found to perform better shortly after listing than those with tongue-twisters.
So before you send that email, deliver that presentation or finalise that document, ask yourself two questions.
Whatās the gist of what I have to say?
Will it feel good to take in?
Memory gets misty. Make your messages gisty.
Refs:
Sachs, J.S. Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects of connected discourse. Perception & Psychophysics 2, 437ā442 (1967). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208784
McGlone, M. S., & Tofighbakhsh, J. (2000). Birds of a feather flock conjointly (?): Rhyme as reason in aphorisms. Psychological Science, 11(5), 424ā428. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40063553
Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(24), 9369ā9372. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754871/
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