Syntax is the way we place words in a sentence.  The simplest, clearest formulation is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), “The dog chased the cat”.

Yoda uses a very complicated, awkward syntax called an anastrophe, placing the object and the verb before the subject.  Simple is better, right?  Use active voice, not passive, right?

Every rule ever written has exceptions or will if it doesn’t yet.  Humans are messy, what works is messy.  Many phenomena in life follow an inverted U-shaped pattern.  It’s the Goldilocks phenomenon, too little or too much is bad but there’s a sweet spot.

Happiness over time, stress, exercise, self-esteem, sleep – they all follow this pattern.

Complicated syntax is associated with dense, hard to read prose.  Think academic abstract.  It’s a negative feature of our Readability score that correlates with response rate.

But, is it always bad?  Cognitive effort can also follow an inverted U pattern.  We do tend to be cognitive misers, especially when it’s a low salience, passive activity like reading a fundraising appeal.  But a hint of italicizing that makes me put in a tad more effort can increase my attention.

Might the same be true for slightly novel, slightly more complicated syntax?  Why would this work?  Call it a syntax surprise.  I automatically process words that appear in the order my experience tells me they should.  Interrupt this and it can create an element of surprise that has me paying just a tad more attention.

Consider these sentences,

• Donate today and join fellow conservationists
• Join fellow conservationists, donate today

They’re both grammatically correct but the first one is the more common, expected formulation.   Here are the Goldilocks, inverted U shape findings from Atalay et al. in the Journal of Marketing.  Notice the sweet spot of 2ish for syntactic surprise level.

I’d recommend trying this for subject or headline email and ad testing respectively.

What’s that you ask?  How the hell do you know your syntax surprise score?  The kind researchers have obliged, there’s a free calculator here, Syntactic Surprise Calculator (syntactic-surprise-calculator.com).

Kevin