Good writing is pointing out. As Steven Pinker notes in his book The Sense of Style, writing is cognitively unnatural: it's such a new way of communicating, on the timescale of human evolution, that it's little wonder we struggle. So it helps to approach it by means of an analogy with something we did evolve to do. Quoting the academics Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Pinker suggests approaching writing as if you were pointing something in the environment out to another person – something that she would notice for herself, if only she knew where to look. Imagine directing someone's gaze across a valley, to a specific house on the other side. "You should pretend," writes Pinker, "that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing." He calls this the "joint attention" strategy.

Oliver Burkeman