Signposting: How to reduce cognitive load for your reader
When you're sharing complex ideas or writing long memos, use signposting to guide your reader. Use this for internal memos and external customer-facing messaging.
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In this week’s newsletter, you’ll learn a simple writing technique that will make your messages easier to skim and more fun to read.
What is signposting?
List of my favorite signposting words
When signposting is most valuable
Read time: 5 minutes
NOTE: Check out the related post on emotional signposting
As knowledge workers, we spend an enormous amount of time communicating.
This is why I believe one of the most thoughtful, selfless things you can do on a daily basis is reduce cognitive load in your writing. Your recipient shouldn’t have to decipher, guess, ask, follow up, parse through, or clarify what you meant because you sent a poorly-written Slack message.
Writing clearly is even higher stakes for longer memos where you have multiple important ideas to convey, but your message might be at risk of being visually unappealing, hard to skim, and overwhelming when you most need your recipient to stay engaged.
So how do you write more clearly if you’re sharing complex ideas that require nuance that’s hard to explain, without spending twice as much time drafting your memo?
Enter: signposting.
What is signposting?
Signposting is using key words, phrases, or an overall structure in your writing to signal what the rest of your post is about. This helps your reader quickly get grounded, so their brain doesn’t waste cycles wondering where you’re taking them.
You can use signposting throughout your writing:
Memo level: Headers, subheaders, toggles, paragraphs, white space
Paragraph level: Topic sentences, bullet points, numbered lists
Sentence level: Transition words or intentionally sequencing words in a sentence
With signposting, you add information hierarchy without relying on rich text formatting, although rich text formatting is a type of signposting in itself. For example, Paul Graham primarily uses plain text in his essays, but each paragraph has a clear topic sentence. Topic sentences are a type of signposting.
Other examples: Adding a section at the bottom of an email stating action steps: X, Y, Z. Or, numbering a list. Sometimes, people will only address your last question (very annoying) which requires following up to say, “okay, how about the other questions I asked?” It’s much more obvious if they ignore your questions if you’ve numbered them in a list.
The main benefit of signposting is it makes your writing more skimmable—it makes longer writing feel shorter, clearer, faster-paced. This increases the chances your recipient will actually read your whole document and, more importantly, take action.
List of my favorite signposting words
Signposting words, or transition words/phrases, serve as connective tissue between ideas. Does one idea flow to another? Does X happen despite or because of Y? I’m sure there’s an official grammatical term for transition or connector words, but for our purposes, I’m more interested in the practical application of this concept in daily business writing.
Here’s a list of signposting words I use regularly:
For example shows you’re about to show an example. If the person doesn’t need examples, they can skip it. Some people say you can remove for example to be more concise, but you might have seen my rant about how being concise doesn’t mean being brief. As a reader, the benefits of seeing for example as a signpost outweigh the two extra words it adds.
Because shows your rationale. It’s a powerful word because it makes you more persuasive regardless of what comes after the word because, according to a study done by Harvard researchers in the 1970s called the copy machine experiment. If there’s a way to restructure a sentence to use because, I’ll usually do it.
First, second, third, next, finally: These provide visual clues if you’re writing paragraphs. They show information hierarchy using prose.
Up until now, to date, going forward: These words highlight that change is happening. Humans are wired to notice change. Your manager likely cares less about what's going well vs what’s changing, evolving, and new. I like that this juxtaposition helps frame your idea and get your reader oriented in “the before times” vs “the after times.” Example: Until now, we’ve X. Going forward, we will do Y.
For context: If the person doesn’t need context, they can skip this. This gives your reader agency and puts them in control, which they will appreciate.
At this point: This brings it back to the current moment in time. You might have been explaining a trend or pattern, and you can use this transition to bring people to your conclusion in the present. It also helps heighten drama in your message.
And, but, therefore, so: This shows the logic of your argument. You can’t swap but and therefore because you’ll literally change the meaning. One of my pet peeves is when people are sloppy and interchange these connector words. It forces your reader to guess the logical flow when they shouldn’t have to.
This means: After you share an important piece of information, you can use this means to elaborate on the implications, trade-offs, or help your reader fully internalize your point.
To be clear: This is great for proactively addressing common pushback you know you’re going to get.
As a next step: Another one of my favorites. This phrase jumps out, keeps the ball moving, and highlights any upcoming action items.
These words can kick off paragraphs, or be used within a paragraph. And they pop when your reader is skimming, which makes your writing easier to consume. These phrases aren't the only way to signpost, but they illustrate the concept and are a good way to get started.
When signposting is most valuable
Signposting isn’t only about sentence structure. It’s about your underlying logic. Using signposting can help you think more clearly. A structure like “Up until now, we X. Going forward, we will Y” can turn a vague, abstract notion into a concrete, articulate idea that more clearly draws a line in the sand.
Show the emotional subtext. Have you ever read a note and thought, “Wait, is this good news or bad news?” I often read memos where the leader intended to share positive news, but the way it was written sounded ominous. Make sure to control for the emotional subtext. For example, I might signpost by saying “Good news: X” or use a few positive key words that pop.
You should signpost verbally too. Signposting is even more valuable when you’re speaking out loud because your listener can’t pause and reread, or zoom out to see the high-level structure of a two-page document. They’re listening to you, word by word, reveal the two pages of material. This can make folks feel impatient and out of control—unless you use signposting.
For example, if you’re drafting scripts for marketing or in-product videos, signposting can make your videos clearer. At Maven, this was one of the principles that made the biggest difference for helping my team create strong scripts quickly.
“In this video, I’m going to share...”
“First… second… third…”
“What you’re seeing here is…”
“The reason this matters is…”
If you're recording an internal Loom video for coworkers on how you improved the product flow, you can give a verbal outline of what’s to come:
“For context, we left off last week with [the problem the team was facing]. So I took a stab at solving these issues, and today I will review the changes I made. Alright, let’s get into it.”
“The part that’s most important to point out is…”
“First, I’ll give a quick high-level view of the three major changes, then I’ll highlight specific in-product copy changes that I believe make the experience more intuitive.”
A good rule of thumb: The simpler your underlying ideas, the less you need to signpost. The more complex your ideas, or the lengthier your writing, the more you should consider it.
If you want to go deeper on signposting, check out the next post on emotional signposting.
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Wes
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If you want to binge-read, check out these recent essays:
One of the "signposts" you used in your piece but didn't call out: *boldface* text. That's a visual rather than a verbal cue, but it's effective at pointing to the important bits. I used to avoid it because in formal written English (like academic papers, analysis reports) it's frowned upon. But these days, with all the content flowing in every direction, that little visual cue helps people spot the important words or ideas and it gives "texture" to medium-length bodies of text -- the bolded words act like little anchors in the open ocean (or lake, pond, or stream) of text.
I pride myself on being a clear, articulate and direct writer (years as an MBB consultant really drove this thinking into me) and thought I had seen it all, but this was some of the most actionable advice on writing at work that I've read anywhere. Well done and thank you!