Writers — what are you doing differently to prevent readers from mistaking your work for AI? www.wired.com/story/more-t...

More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’

Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chat bots.

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The New Science of Scientific Writing Book Release: September 15, 2026.

Your Ideas Are Strong. Help English-speaking Readers Find Them. English academic writing operates by an implicit structural logic. Native speakers absorb it over a lifetime of reading — they feel when a sentence lands right, even if they cannot explain why.

If you cannot communicate your findings clearly in publications and grant proposals, you will die with only your supervisor's recognition.

New Book Release Date: September 15, 2026 This is what I've seen across thousands of grant narratives: Writers follow every grammar rule perfectly, then wonder why reviewers miss the innovation.

I received another heart-felt email from a researcher who is benefiting from my Reader Expectation Approach:

We should all congratulate the many excellent people who, in the past 60 years, have labored to recognize the need of ordinary, non-lawyer folks to understand the language of legal documents that control important parts of their lives. georgegopen.com/2026/07/14/i...

“I Know It When I See It”: A New Way to Define the “Plain” in “Plain English” | George David Gopen

Credited with reshaping scientific writing: George David Gopen, JD, PhD, Duke Professor Emeritus in Rhetoric, has trained tens of thousands of professionals at NIH, Harvard Law, Pfizer, and 200+ organ...

georgegopen.com

My work on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is now available in the form of two YouTube playlists: "T.S. Eliot's the Waste Land, Read by George David Gopen" and "T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A Close Textual Analysis by George David Gopen." lnkd.in/e7KH_gYB www.youtube.com/channel/UCrF...

George David Gopen's Reader Expectation Approach

This channel contains a variety of content from George David Gopen, JD, PhD, Professor Emeritus in the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University and creator of the Reader Expectation Approach (REA) to p...

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“Style” is choice. Your writing style is the sum total of all the choices you habitually make when you form sentences. Putting important material in weak places in the sentence’s structure will make you sound weak.

Separating your subject from your verb, by inserting any number of supportive or burdensome qualifications, trailing one after another, forcing the reader to keep straining forward in expectation of finally finding the verb, which produces unwanted tension and reduces comprehension...

NEW: George David Gopen reads T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Part I — "The Burial of the Dead." "April is the cruellest month." One of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, read by someone who has spent a lifetime listening to how English actually moves. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl2O...

George David Gopen reads T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Part I: "The Burial of the Dead"

YouTube video by George David Gopen's Reader Expectation Approach

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About making the sentence shorter to make it better: (1) Length is not nearly as important to control as structure. Putting the right words in the right PLACES in the sentence is far more important.

The Anthem Press has announced the release date of my latest book: The New Science of Scientific Writing: August 2026. Within the year, 17 translations are scheduled. You can sign-up to be notified by the publisher at the following link: anthempress.com/books/the-ne...

The New Science of Scientific Writing | Anthem Press

Using Reader Expectations to Transform Scientific Communication

anthempress.com

The Question of Agency in Legal Writing — When Agatha Christie writes an engaging mystery, the question of agency is so compelling that we refer to the book as a "Who Done It?" Where agency is concerned, the aim of a legal brief should be quite the opposite—not to mystify, but rather to clarify.

George David Gopen | Reader Expectation Approach

George David Gopen, JD, PhD, Duke Professor Emeritus in Rhetoric, has trained tens of thousands of professionals in his Reader Expectation Approach to writing from the reader's perspective.

georgegopen.com

The New Science of Scientific Writing by George David Gopen—Available from Anthem Press in London in August of 2026. For more than three decades, George David Gopen’s Reader Expectation Approach has transformed how scientists, researchers, and professionals write —

In school you could blithely litter the page with names and dates and buzz words, even if you didn’t understand their significance, and still get an A from teacher — because teacher already knew a way to put all those pieces together...

It is insufficient to create a sentence that is merely capable of being interpreted the way you want. The sentence is sufficient only when it leads at least 95% of your readers to perceive precisely what you wanted them to perceive.

What happens to you when all your auditory and visual expectations are constantly fulfilled, with no need to be prepared for something different? Your breathing slows down. When it slows to a significantly low level, we call it sleep. If it slows significantly more, we call it death...

You know him. You've seen him many times. He stands behind the lectern and does not move. He reads from a text almost continually. He never varies his volume, his vocal range, or his tempo — keeping a tight rein on his vocal horse, lest it speed up or slow down noticeably.

Plato hated Rhetoric. He wrote an entire dialogue — the Gorgias — attacking it as immoral, on the grounds that a clever person could use it to make the worse argument seem the better.

To learn more about Reader Expectations — how readers go about making sense out of prose — visit georgegopen.com

George David Gopen | Reader Expectation Approach

George David Gopen, JD, PhD, Duke Professor Emeritus in Rhetoric, has trained tens of thousands of professionals in his Reader Expectation Approach to writing from the reader's perspective.

georgegopen.com

Closings should close. The reader should have a feeling of "closing" while closing is happening. If you look at a picture of a zipper, how do you know if it is zipping or unzipping? You look at the zipper's pull-tab. In which direction is it leaning? That will tell you. #inclosing #betterwriting

Last week, a researcher at a national laboratory told me that after attending my seminar, she rewrote a grant proposal she had already submitted — just to see what she had failed to communicate. As it happens, she had failed to communicate a great deal.

You might think that the structure of a whole document must be a good deal more complex than the structure of a sentence or paragraph. Not so — for two reasons:

What Miss Grundy taught us in the 7th grade won't work for writing as part of a professional life: #professionalwriting #paragraphstructure #readerexpectations

For writers, the primary unit of discourse is the sentence. Not so for readers. For them, the primary unit of thought is the paragraph. #readerexpectationapproach #writingforreaders #writingfromthereadersperspective

When you are engaged in the act of writing, no matter how large the document may be, your primary focus at any given moment is on the creation of a single sentence. #thinkingaboutwriting #discourse

If your last grant proposal was rejected, how confident are you that the science was the problem?

Here's an uncomfortable truth: excellent thinkers can be poor communicators — not because they lack intelligence, but because no one ever taught them how a reader's mind actually works. What would change in your field if researchers were trained to write for the reader instead of for themselves?

Keep things that need to be together together. If they become separated, it causes the reader distress. A subject and its verb long to be together. In an infinitive, the word "to" and the verb form long to be together. #betterwriting #professionalwriting #infinitive