Efficiency or correctness in communication?
The language industry has a long tradition in the pursuit of correctness, based on manually drafted rules. However, the end goal has always been communicative efficiency, which is something that can now be addressed directly using empirical methods. Since there are systematic conflicts between rules and efficiency (or between normative and empirical rules), what kind of evidence would it take to convince writers to prefer efficiency to correctness?
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John Carroll did extensive research on an aspect of this in the 80s. His finding are recorded in a book called "The Nurnberg Funnel" and lead to the development of a practice called "minimalism" in technical communication.
What Carroll observed was that people do not read manuals linearly. They prefer to engage with the product, work till they get stuck, and then use documentation to try to get unstuck.
Carroll posited the existence of "the paradox of sensemaking" that says that what the reader already knows gets in the way of what they are reading and that it takes real world experience, and failure, to break down preconceptions and to actually makes sense of what the text is telling you.
This is only one aspect of the broader question you are asking about -- and perhaps a higher level case, but I think the principles and the evidence to support them might be helpful.
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