Don’t Forget to Flush

“This stall has a manual flush toilet.  Don’t forget to flush.” 

This is a sign posted in one of the restroom stalls at my institution.  And it irks me every time I see it.  I want to bring my red pen, cross out “Don’t forget,” and replace it with “Remember.”  Why?  Because “remember” is more concise than “don’t forget,” and the cognitive effects of negation on reading comprehension make it more likely that a reader will fail to flush because of the sign.

A lot of psycholinguistic researchers have studied the cognitive effects of negation.  It is generally understood that negation slows both processing speed and accuracy: “[N]egated phrases/sentences are processed with more difficulty (slower, with more errors) than the affirmative counterparts.”[i]  And a recent study discovered that negation can also thwart purpose and intent.

“Intuitively, negated concepts (e.g., ‘not good’) entertain some relation with the affirmative concept (e.g., ‘good’) as well as their counterpart (e.g., ‘bad’).”[ii]  In other words, “negation can either eliminate the negated concept and convey the opposite meaning (‘not good’ = ‘bad’) or mitigate the meaning of its antonym along a semantic continuum (‘not good’ = ‘less good,’ ‘average,’ or ‘somehow bad’).”[iii]

The fact that negation results in multiple possible meanings is not new information; any elementary school educator could tell you that instructing students to “walk in the hallways” is far more effective at obtaining the desired end than directing students, “don’t run in the hallways.”  The former instruction limits the universe of acceptable hallway behavior, while the latter eliminates only one of many possible means of hallway activity (i.e., while not running, one could still skip, somersault, dance, or skateboard in the hallways and comply with the directive).

But researchers discovered that, between the options of elimination and mitigation of a negated concept, people were more likely to interpret negation as mitigating, rather than eliminating, the concept.[iv]  In other words, a reader faced with the sentence, “this coffee is not hot,” is more likely to understand the coffee to be something less than hot (e.g., room temperature) rather than cold.[v]

An additional issue arises with the use of negation—priming your audience for a potentially undesired outcome.  In my restroom example, the word choice in the sentence, “Don’t forget to flush,” primes the reader to forget (the undesired result), rather than remember (the desired result).  And the word choice coupled with the fact that readers tend to overlook the word “not” makes it more likely that the sign would cause someone to forget, rather than remember, to flush.

As professional wordsmiths, attorneys should use care in their choice of when and how to use negation in their writing, recognizing its potential effects on both meaning and understanding.

[i] Arianna Zuanazzi, Pablo Ripollés, Wy Ming Lin, Laura Gwilliams, Jean-Rémi King, David Poeppel, Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives, PLOS Biology (May 30, 2024), available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002622 (last accessed July 7, 2024).

[ii] Id.

[iii] Id.

[iv] Id. The researchers also noted that their findings were limited to scalar adjectives (i.e., those that occur on a continuum), rather than true dichotomies (e.g., “dead” versus “alive”).

[v] NPR, Short Wave Science (June 3, 2024), available at https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-4978901. Another issue arises with negation—a lack of clarity with respect to which part of the sentence is affected by the negation.  In other words,

in a sentence like Rachel did not bake the bread, potential alternatives for the negation can be found along the dimension of the actor, along the dimension of activities and along the dimension of the patient, that is, Rachel could have baked something else, e.g., a cake, she could have done something else to the bread, e.g., cut it, or someone else could have baked the bread.  As the example demonstrates, alternatives are semantically related to the negated information (e.g., entity, event).

Viviana Haase, Maria Spychalska, Markus Werning, Investigating the Comprehension of Negated Sentences Employing World Knowledge: An Event-Related Potential Study, Frontiers in Psychology (Oct. 2019), available at:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6843029/ (last accessed July 7, 2024).