The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

by Steven Pinker

Clumsy writers do a lot of that, too. They unthinkingly follow the advice to say what you’re going to say, say it, and then say what you’ve said. The advice comes from classical rhetoric, and it makes sense for long orations:

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.2

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.

When we know something well, we don’t realize how abstractly we think about it.

Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us.