Here at Wilson-Taylor, we often coach each other to ‘not make the audience work too hard’ to understand what we are trying to get across.

Turns out that the most basic ground rules of good communication — good grammar — supports our advice.

With apparently very little to occupy themselves, researchers at the University of Oregon hooked up some subjects’ brains to measure what happened when they heard bad grammar. 

Poor things. Their brains had to work harder to understand the meaning of a syntactically scrambled sentence.

Maybe we should update the classic KISS formula from Keep It Simple, Sweetie, to Keep It Short and Sweet. And uncomplicated.  It’s just easier on all of us that way!