Barbara Minto
Barbara Minto is a former McKinsey consultant and writing teacher, and the author of The Pyramid Principle, first published in 1987. Her method tells writers to state the conclusion first, group the support beneath it and order each group logically. On page 73 she says the writer and the reader are not peers in interpreting the writer's thinking, which describes the curse of knowledge without naming it. Her book is a method resting on professional experience, and it is not evidence about how minds work.
Who they are
According to the book's About the author page, as the vault records it, Minto grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and began her career on the staff of the industrialist Cyrus Eaton, working on the team that organised the Pugwash Conferences of nuclear scientists. She left in 1961 for Harvard Business School and returned to Cleveland in 1963 to join McKinsey & Company as its first female consultant. Her writing was noticed, and in 1966 she was transferred to London to develop the writing skills of the firm's growing European staff. Since 1973 she has run her own firm, Minto International, Inc.
Her account of what she found is that the difficulties in Düsseldorf and Paris were the same as those in New York and Cleveland, and that the problem was not so much getting the language right as getting the thinking clear. That insight became the method. The vault treats her as a living person and makes no claim about her circumstances beyond what the book's own pages state.
Books
Key ideas
The reader is not your peer
Minto's method begins from the reader's position. Positioning, she writes on page 73, exists to make the reader's thinking job as easy as possible. The reader is rarely trained in analysis and reflection and cannot have near the writer's understanding of the subject, so, in her words, "you and he are not peers in interpreting your thinking". Transitions are there to pull the reader's mind back where it belongs, and she advises them only where needed.
That is the curse of knowledge described from the practitioner's side. She does not name it, and she cites no experiment for it. The References at the back of her book, 78 items on pages 215 to 218, are books and essays with no item keyed to any page or claim, and the list contains no journal articles in experimental psychology. The vault's judgement is that the method is useful and the cognitive claims behind it are asserted, not tested.
The editorial rule
Cite Minto for the method and for her own formulations, such as the pyramid, the key line and the so-what test. Do not cite her as an authority on cognition. Where an article needs a claim about comprehension or memory, it should go to the primary literature. The Why We Project uses her here as a procedure that fits the problem the experiments measure, and the experiments themselves come from elsewhere. See Curse of Knowledge.
Sources
- Minto, B. The Pyramid Principle. Pearson Education / Financial Times, ISBN 978-1-292-76325-5. Page 73 and the About the author page.