MALE SPEAKER: Steven Pinker is
a Johnstone family professor of psychology at
Harvard University, chair of the usage panel of the
American Heritage Dictionary, and one of the world's
foremost writers on language, mind,
and human nature. His research has won prizes
from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal
Institution, of the American Psychological Association,
and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received
several teaching awards and many
prizes for his books-- "The Language Instinct," "How
The Mind Works," "The Blank Slate," and "The Better
Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined." He has been named
humanist of the year, Time's 100 most influential
people in the world today, and foreign policy world's
top 100 public intellectuals. He has written for The New York
Times, Time Magazine, the New Republic, the New Yorker,
and other publications on consciousness, genomics,
morality, war and peace, and of course, language. Ladies and gentleman,
Steven Pinker. [APPLAUSE] STEVEN PINKER: Thank
you, [INAUDIBLE]. Why is so much writing so bad,
and how can we make it better? Why do we have to
decipher so much legalese, like "the revocation by these
regulations of a provision previously revoked
subject savings does not affect the continued
operations"? Why is it so hard to understand
an academic article, like, "it is the moment of
non-construction, disclosing the abstention of
actuality from the concept, in part through its invitation
to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness of its
fall into conceptually"? Why is it so hard to set the
time on a digital alarm clock? [LAUGHTER] Well there's no
shortage of theories, and the most popular theory is
captured in this cartoon, where the boss says to the
tech writer, good start, needs more gibberish. In other words, bad writing
is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish
to evade responsibility. Pasty-faced nerds
get their revenge on the girls who turned them
down for dates in high school, and the jocks how kicked
sand in their faces. Pseudo-intellectuals try
to bamboozle their readers with highfalutin' gobbledygook,
concealing the fact that they have nothing to say. Well I have no doubt that
the bamboozlement theory is true of some writers,
some of the time. But in my experience it
doesn't really ring true. I know plenty of
scientists and scholars who do groundbreaking
work on important topics, they have no need to impress
and nothing to say-- still, their writing stinks. Good people can write bad prose. The other theory
that is frequently routed to explain bad
writing is that digital media are to blame for
ruining the language. I'm sure you've all seen this--
Google is Making Us Stupid. The Dumbest Generation has been
stupefied by digital media, and they are
jeopardizing our future. Twitter is forcing us to think
and write in 140 characters. Well I think there's some
problems with the dumbest generation theory as well,
because it makes a prediction that it must have
been very different before the advent
of digital media. Say-- And those of you who
were around in the 1980s can surely remember
that back then teenagers spoke in fluid paragraphs. Bureaucrats wrote
in plain English, and every academic
article is a masterpiece in the art of the essay. Yes, that's the way
it was in the 1980s. Or was it the 1970s? The truth is of course that bad
writing has burdened readers in every era, such as 1961, in
which one commentator wrote, recent graduates, including
those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery
of the language at all. Well maybe you have to go back
before the advent of television and radio, say to 1917. When someone wrote
from every college in the country goes up the
cry, our freshman can't spell, can't punctuate. Every high school
is in disrepair, because it's pupils are
so ignorant of the nearest rudiments. Well maybe you have to go
back to earlier centuries when literacy was prized. Well in 1785, they were
saying, our language is degenerating very fast. I began to fear that it will
be impossible to check it. And then of course there are
the ancient grammar police, like the commentator who
said, oh for crying out loud, you never end a sentence
with a little birdie. [LAUGHTER] I think a better theory comes
from a observation by Charles Darwin that man has an
instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the
babel of our young children. Whereas no child has an
instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write. Speech is instinctive,
but writing is, and always has been, hard. Your readers are unknown,
invisible, and inscrutable. They exist only in the
writer's imagination. They can't react if
something is unclear, break into the conversation
or ask for clarification. So writing is an
act of pretense, and writing is an
active craftsmanship. Well, what can we do to
improve the craft of writing? For many decades that
question had a single answer-- you hand students this. The iconic Elements Of Style,
by Cornell professor William Strunk, Jr., and his
former student, E.B. White, also known as the New
Yorker essayist, and author of "Charlotte's Web"
and "Stuart Little." You will notice by the way that
the junior member of this pair was born before the turn
of the century, that is before the turn
of the 20th century. There's no doubt
that there is plenty of good sense in "The
Elements Of Style." And it is well
worth consulting-- it has pithy, little
advisories such as use definite, specific,
concrete language. Write with nouns and verbs. Put the emphatic words of
the sentence at the end. And in another little gem
of self-exemplification, omit needless words. Which, indeed, omits
needless words. On the other hand,
there are number of reasons why "The
Elements Of Style" can't be the sole basis of writing
advice in the 21st century. For one thing, it's filled
with a lot of baffling advice. Such as, the word,
people, is not to be used with words of
number in place of persons. That is, you may
not say six people. Why not? If, of six people,
five went away, how many people would be left? Answer, one people. Did you follow that? It would also rule out things
like three children, 32 teeth, does not seem to
make much sense. How's this? To contact is vague and
self-important do not contact people-- get
in touch with them, look them up, phone them,
find them, or meet them. Well yes, but what
if you don't care how one person is going to
get in touch with another, and what if it was just as
acceptable if they tweet them, instant message them, email
them or any other medium? The basis for this advice
was that the verb to contact happened to be a neologism,
when White was a young man, and so it graded on his ears. In the many decades
since then, to contact has become an unexceptionable
part of the language, precisely because it
serves a need-- mainly, sometimes you don't
care how one person is going to get in touch with
another one unless you do so. So you don't want to specify
phone them, meet them, and so on. Or how about this one? Note that the word clever
means one thing when applied to people, and other
would applied to horses. A clever horse is a good-natured
one, not an ingenious one. [LAUGHTER] The problem with traditional
style advice is that it consists of an arbitrary
list of Do's and Don'ts based on the tastes and
peeves of the authors. It is not based on a principle
understanding of how language works, and as a
result, users have no way of understanding and
assimilating the advice, and much of the advice, as I'll
show you, is just plain wrong. I think we can do better today. We could base writing
advice on the science and scholarship of language. On modern grammatical
theory, which is a marked advance over
the traditional Latin-based grammars. Evidence-based
dictionaries, and grammars. Research in cognitive
science on what makes sentences easy
or hard to read. And historical and
critical studies of usage. And this is what I've tried
to do in the sense of style. It begins with a model
of effective prose. As I mentioned, writing
is an unnatural act, and good style, above all,
requires a mental model of the communication scenario. Who is the reader, and
what are you as a writer trying to accomplish? My favorite model of the
ideal communication scenario comes from a wonderful
little book called "Clear and Simple as the
Truth," by the literary scholars from Francis-Noel Thomas,
and Mark Turner, who outline a model of communication
they call classic style. The model is that prose is
a window onto the world. The writer sees
something in the world, the reader has not
yet noticed it. The writer positions the
reader so that the reader can see it with her own eyes. The writer and
reader are equals, just that the writer
knows something that the reader has
not yet noticed. The goal is to help the reader
see an objective reality, and the style is conversation. Well this all sounds
pretty obvious. What is non-classic style? Well there are many
alternatives to classic style, they-- Turner and Thomas
describe contemplative style, oracular style, practical
style, and a number of others. But the ones that academics
and other professionals often write in is
a style they call postmodern or self-conscious
in which the writer's chief, if unstated concern
is to escape being convicted of philosophical naivete
about his own enterprise. They explain, "when
we open a cookbook, we completely put
aside, and expect the author to put aside
the kind of question that leads to the heart of certain
philosophical traditions. Is it possible to
talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is food something about
which knowledge as possible? Can anyone ever tell us
anything true about cooking? Classic style,
similarly, puts aside as inappropriate, philosophical
questions about its enterprise. If it took these
questions up, it could never get around
to treating its subject, and its purpose is exclusively
to treat its subject." And I believe that-- let
me-- since classic prose is about showing
something to the reader, it's only fair that I show you
an example of classic prose. So here's an example from
an article in "Newsweek" by the physicist Brian
Greene explaining the theory of
inflationary cosmology, and one of its implications--
multiple universes, or the multiverse. Greene writes-- "If space
is now expanding, then at ever earlier
times, the universe must have been ever smaller. At some moment in the
distant past, everything we now see, the
ingredients responsible for every planet, every star,
every galaxy, even space itself, must been compressed
to an infinitesimal speck, but then swelled outward,
evolving into the universe as we know it." The Big Bang theory was born. Yet scientists were aware that
the Big Bang theory suffered from a significant shortcoming. Of all things, it
leaves out the bang. Einstein's equations
do a wonderful job of describing how the universe
evolved from a split second after the bang,
but the equations break down similar to the
error message returned by a calculator when you try to
divide one by zero when applied to the extreme environment of
the universe's earliest moment. The Big Bang thus
provides no insight into what might have
powered the bang itself. Now this covers some pretty
sophisticated physics, and abstruse mathematics, but
Greene presents it in a way that you can see everything for
yourself in your mind's eye. If you know that
space is expanding, then you can mentally
play the movie in reverse, and extrapolate back to the
singularity at which space was infinitesimally small,
and imagine it then, the movie, going
forward, in return. The abstruse concept of
an equation breaking down can be appreciated by the
reader either by pulling out a calculator and
dividing one by zero, and sure enough, your calculator
will give you an error message. Or, you could
even-- the reader is welcome to try to imagine
what it could possibly mean for one to be
divided into zero parts, or some number of
parts, each of which was zero. And so the reader
can see for herself exactly what Greene
is trying to show. I believe that many examples
of good writing advice are implications of the
model of communication behind classic prose. For example, the
focus of good writing should be on thing
being shown, not on the activity of studying it. The following is-- that
is, the writer's job, peer group, daily
activities, and so on. Now I am daily-faced with
reading papers and articles that begin in the following way. "In recent years, an increasing
number of researchers have turned their attention to
the problem of child language acquisition. In this article recent
theories of this process will be reviewed." Well, no offense, but
not a whole lot of people are really interested in how
professors spend their time. A classic way of introducing
an article on the same topic would be, "All children
acquire the ability to speak and
understand a language without explicit lessons, how
do they accomplish this feat?" A corollary is to minimize
the kind of apologizing that suffuses academic prose. Again, this should
be all too familiar to those of you who have read
academic review articles. "The problem of
language acquisition is extremely complex. It is difficult to give
precise definitions of the concept of 'language'
and the concept of 'acquisition' and the concept of children. There's much uncertainty
about the interpretation of experimental data, and
a great deal of controversy surrounding the theories. More research needs to be done." Well, classic prose
gives the reader credit for being smart enough to
know that many concepts are hard to define, and
many controversies are hard to resolve. The reader is there to
see what the writer is going to do about it. Another corollary of the
model behind classic prose is to minimize the
kind of hedging that professional writers are
apt to indulge in, where they drizzle their prose with
mushy little qualifiers. Like-- somewhat, fairly, nearly,
seemingly, in part, relatively, comparatively, predominately,
to some extent, so to speak, and presumably. And the similar
device using shutter quotes, to imply that
they don't really mean what they are saying. I'll give you an example from
a letter of recommendation that I received. She is a quote
"quick study" and has been able to educate herself
in virtually any area that interests her. Well are we to understand this
as meaning that this young woman is a quick study, or
that she is a quick study, namely someone who is kind
of rumored or alleged to be a quick study, but maybe isn't. And what is that
virtually doing? Is it that there are some areas
in which-- that interest her where she just never
bothered to educate herself, or was unsuccessful in doing so. The use of hedges has become
so reflexive in professionals and academics that at
one point I approached a distinguished
scientist and I asked her how she was and she
pulled out a picture of her four-year-old
daughter and she said, we virtually adore her. Aw. Why the compulsive hedging? Well there is a saying
among bureaucrats that you must always follow
the imperative CYA, Cover Your Anatomy. [LAUGHTER] And there is an alternative--
namely, "So sue me!" That is, it's often better to
be clear and wrong, than fuzzy, and as the physicists
say, not even wrong. Even when you don't, one can
count on the cooperative nature of ordinary conversation to
avoid unnecessary hedges. If someone says that they
are moving away from Seattle because it's a rainy
city, you understand them not as implying that it
rains there 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
52 weeks a year. But just that is
relatively rainy, and she didn't have
to actually say, Seattle is a relatively
rainy city for you to understand it in that way. Another implication
of classic prose is that since it is
a window, the writer must work to keep
up the illusion that the reader is
seeing the world, rather than just
listening to verbiage. And for that reason, it is
imperative to, as they say, avoid cliches like the plague. You're all familiar with
the kind of writer who dispenses verbiage
like this, "We needed to get the ball rolling in
our search for the holy grail, but found that it was neither a
magic bullet, nor a slam dunk. So we rolled with
the punches, and let the chips fall where
they may, while seeing the glasses half full. Which is easier said than done. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: Don't
they turn a corner? STEVEN PINKER: Pardon me? Or, of course, they turned
a corner, absolutely yes. At the leading edge, after they
found the low-hanging fruit. If you just ladle out
one cliche after another, either your reader will simply
shut down their visual cortex, or if they keep
it awake they will get derailed by the
inevitable mixed metaphors. Like this one from another
letter of recommendation. "Jeff is a renaissance
men, drilling down to the core issues and
pushing the envelope." Not clear how you can do
both at the same time. No one has yet
invented a condom that will knock people's socks off. And you may also be eligible
for membership in an AWFUL-- Americans who figuratively
use literally. Now it's OK to say
she literally blushed, it's a little more problematic
to say she literally exploded. And it's very, very bad to say
she literally emasculated him. Classic prose is about
the world, not about the conceptual tools with
which we understand the world. And so classic prose,
avoids meta concepts, namely concepts about concepts. Like approach, assumption,
concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model,
perspective, process, role, strategy, tendency, variable. And admit it, haven't you
seen these words a lot in professional prose? For example. This is from a lawyer--
a legal scholar writing in "The New York Times." I have serious
doubts that trying to amend the Constitution
would work on an actual level. On the aspirational level,
a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable. In other words, I
doubt that trying to amend the Constitution
would actually succeed, but it may be valuable
to aspire to it. Or, it's important to
approach the subject from a variety of strategies,
including mental health assistance, but also from a
law-enforcement perspective. That is we need to
consult psychiatrists, but we also may have
to inform the police. Classic prose narrates
ongoing events, we see agents performing
actions that affect objects just as we do when an
event unfolds in real life. Non-classic prose tends
to thing-ify events and then refer to them
rather than narrating them in real time. And there is a dangerous
rule of English grammar that makes this all too
easy called nominalization. Where you take a
perfectly spry verb, and you entomb it as a noun. So instead of appearing,
someone makes an appearance. Instead of organizing
something, you bring about the
organization of it. Helen Sword, an English scholar,
refers to them as zombie nouns because they kind of
lumber across the stage without any conscious
agent actually directing their motion. And turgid professional prose
is full of nominalizations like, "prevention
of neurogenesis, diminished social avoidance." Meaning when we
prevented neurogenesis, the mice no longer
avoided other mice. "Subjects were tested
under conditions of good to excellent
acoustic isolation." To which, "We tested the
students in a quiet room." Now the use of meta concepts,
and nominalizations-- it almost defines the stereotype
of "academese" in the public imagination. As in this editorial cartoon
by Tom Toles, in which he shows an academician
explaining the reason that verbal SAT scores
are at an all time low. "Incomplete implementation
of strategized programmatics designated
to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization
of communication skills, pursuant to standardize
review and assessment of languaginal development." Any interrogatory
verbalizations? It isn't just academics
who use meta concepts and nominalizations,
it's also politicians, As when Rick Perry-- when
the Republican National Convention was threatened
by a hurricane, said, "Right now there
is not any anticipation that there will be
a cancellation." In other words,
"Right now we don't anticipate that we will
have to cancel it." And corporate consultants,
a man explained to a reporter what
he did for living, he said, "I'm a digital and
social media strategist, I deliver programs,
products, and strategies to our corporate clients across
the spectrum of communications functions." The reporter kept pressing
him as to what that meant. And finally he said,
"I teach big companies how to use Facebook." [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: Yeah, thank you! STEVEN PINKER: And
product engineers. Portable generators used to
have the warning sticker that said, "mild exposure
to CO can result in accumulated damage over time. Extreme exposure
to CO may rapidly be fatal without producing
significant warning symptoms." Yeah, Yeah. And what began to happen is
that every year, several people asphyxiated themselves
and their families by running them indoors. And so they changed
the sticker to read, using a generator indoors
can kill you in minutes. [LAUGHTER] STEVEN PINKER: So classic
prose is literally a matter of life and death. Yes, literally. OK, so how does understanding
the design of language lead to better writing advice,
as I promised at the outset? Well another contributor
to zombie prose, is the passive voice. The difference between
the dog bit the man in the active voice,
and the men was bitten by the dog in
the passive voice. And it's well known
that the passive voice is overused by academics. "On the basis of
the analysis which was made of the data
which were collected it is suggested that the null
hypothesis can be rejected." And by lawyers, "If
the outstanding balance is prepaid in full, the
unearned finance charge will be refunded." And political officials, this
is the recently ex-director of the Secret Service, who
in explaining to Congress how it was that an armed men managed
to vault the fence of the White House, sprint across
the lawn, and now waltz into the White House. She admitted,
"Mistakes were made." What linguists call
the evasive passive. And not surprisingly, all
the classic style manuals warn writers away from
the passive voice. As Strunk and White advised,
"Use the active voice. The active voice is usually
more direct and vigorous than the passive. Many a tame sentence can
be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive
in the active voice for some perfunctory expression
as there is or could be heard." And do you notice something a
little odd about this advice? Yes, it uses the
passive voice to advise against the passive voice. George Orwell, in
the other classic bit of writing advice that is handed
out to every college freshman also advises against
using the passive. He notes that, "A
mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the
most marked characteristic of modern English prose. I list below various
of the tricks by means of which the
work of prose construction is habitually dodged. The passive voice is wherever
possible used in preference to the active, a bit of
advice that has not one, but two passives to warn
readers away from the passive. Well this self-contradiction
tells us something. The passive could not survive
in the English language for centuries if it did
not serve some purpose. Why can't we do without it? The answer comes down to
the very design of language. You can think of
language as an app for converting a
web of knowledge into a string of words. Now cognitive psychologists
model a person's knowledge as a semantic network, a kind
of mind-wide web, where there are nodes that
correspond to concepts and there are connectors,
or links, or relationships, that stand for logical and
conceptual relationships among them. So this is a tiny and
simplified fragment of a semantic network that
captures a person's knowledge of the tragic story brought to
life by Sophocles in "Oedipus Rex." Now what happens when
you have to communicate a bit of your knowledge
to another person? Well you have to convert
it into a sentence. What is a sentence? It is a linear string of words. Such as, in Sophocles play,
Oedipus married his mother, and killed his father. One word after another. Well this linearization of
this high-dimensional web means that language is saddled
with an inherent problem. The ordering of
words in a sentence has to do two things at once. It has to serve as
a code for meaning, signaling to the reader
who did what to whom, but it also necessarily presents
some bits of information to the reader before
others, and thus affects how the information is absorbed
into the reader's mind. In particular the earlier
material in the sentence naturally pertains to the topic,
what the sentence is about, what the reader is in
effect already looking at. The later material is the focus
or focal point of the sentence, and it's what the reader
should now notice. Any prose that violates
these principles will feel, as we say, choppy. Or disjointed, or incoherent. So this now helps us
understand the main function of the passive, it
allows writers to they the same semantic information,
namely the same information about who did what to whom but
with a different surface order. That is it allows the writer
start with the done-to rather than with the do-er. Which is why avoid the
passive is bad advice. The passive is the
better construction when the done-to is currently
the focus of the reader's mental gaze. And let me give you an example. This is a passage taken
from the Wikipedia entry for "Oedipus Rex" which
describes the climactic scene in which the awful truth
behind the Oedipus story is brought to light-- spoiler
alert, and here's how it reads. Describing--
narrating this scene. "A messenger arrives
from Corinth. It emerges that he was formerly
a shepherd on Mount Kithaeron, and during that time
he was given a baby. The baby, he says,
was given to him by another shepherd
from the Laius household who had been told
to get rid of the child." Now notice that this passage
has three passes in a row. First, all eyes are
all the messenger. The passage begins,
a messenger arrives. So we're looking
at the messenger. It's natural then
to use the passive and say, "He was given a baby." Well now our attention
is focused on the baby, so you start the next
sentence with the baby, and that will require that
it be in the passive voice. "The baby was given to the
messenger by another shepherd." Hey, another shepherd. Now we're looking at
the other shepherd, so it's natural that
the next sentence begins with the shepherd.
"The other shepherd had been told to get
rid of the child." So it's a coherent passage
where the anonymous writer has kept in mind where the
reader's mental gaze is directed at every stage. Now imagine that he
had followed the advice to convert the passage
to the active voice. The passage would
read as follows, "A messenger arrives
from Corinth. It emerges that he was formally
a shepherd on mount Kithaeron, and during that time
someone gave him a baby. Another shepherd from
the Laius household, he says, whom someone had
told to get rid of a child, gave the baby to him. Now that is much
harder to follow, because your characters
are parachuting in, in a order that
doesn't correspond to the natural order of
gaze from one to another. More generally, English
syntax provides a writers with constructions that
vary the order in the string while preserving meaning. Oedipus killed Laius. Laius was killed by Oedipus. It was Laius whom
Oedipus killed. It was Oedipus who killed Laius. And so on. And writers must
choose the construction that introduces ideas to the
reader in the order in which she can most naturally
absorbed them. Well this brings us back to
the original question of, why is the passive so common in
bad writing given that there's some circumstances in
which the better choice? Well it's because
good writers narrate a story that are
advanced by protagonists who make things happen. Bad writers work backwards
from their own knowledge, writing down ideas in the order
in which they occur to them. They know how the
story turned out, so they begin with
the outcome, and then they throw in the cause
as an afterthought and indeed the passive voice
makes that all too easy. Part three, why do writers
fall into that trap? Why is it so hard for
writers to use language to convey ideas effectively? My favorite explanation is
a psychological phenomenon that has been called
The Curse of Knowledge. The inability that we
all have to imagine what it's like for someone
else not to know something that you do know. Psychologists also call it
Mind Blindness, Ego-centrism, and Hindsight Bias. The classic illustration
is a experiment taught to every
psychology student. A child comes into a lab, the
experimenter hands the boy, a three-year-old boy an
M&Ms box, he opens it, and he's surprised to
find ribbons inside. So you stuff the ribbons back
into the box, close it back up, put it back on the table. Now he watches as
a second comes in. We'll call him Jason. And you say to the
first boy, what is Jason think is in the box? And the boy says, ribbons. Even though Jason has no
way of knowing that the box contains ribbons. He's just walked into the
room for the first time. In fact, if you
say the boy, what did you think was in the box
when you came into the room? And the child will say, ribbons. Now that he knows
what the box contains he could no longer entertain the
original mental state in which he did not know
what was in the box or the mental state of
a naive third party. Now we adults grow out of this
limitation-- kind of, a bit. Because many studies have
shown that adults to, are apt to project their own
knowledge on to everyone else. If you give students
a list of words and you ask them which
words are likely to be in the vocabulary of
your fellow students, they will guest at
the ones that they know are the ones that
other students will know, ditto with factual knowledge. If you have people who
vary in their familiarity with the gadget, such
as a cell phone and you ask them to estimate how long it
will take someone else to learn how to use the cellphone. The more adept you
are at using it, the less time you think
it'll take other people to learn to use it-- because it
just seems so obvious to you. I believe that the
Curse of Knowledge is the chief contributor
to opaque writing. It simply doesn't
occur to the writer that the readers haven't
learned the jargon, don't know the intermediate
steps that to the writer seem too obvious to mention. They can't visualize
a scene, that in the writer's mind's
eye, is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn't
bother to explain the jargon, or to spell out the logic, or
to supply the concrete details that allow the scene
to be visualized. Just to give you
an example, here is a passage of prose from a
review article in a journal called "Trends in
Cognitive Science" that is meant to be
read by a wide audience of cognitive scientists
such as myself. I read it, and I had no idea
what they were talking about. And here's the passage. It's from an article
on consciousness. "The Slow and integrative
nature of conscious perception is confirmed behaviorally by
observations such as the rabbit illusion, and its
variants, where the way in which a stimulus
is ultimately perceived is influenced by
poststimulus events arising several
hundreds of milliseconds after the original stimulus. Well the writer has
clearly expected that every reader would know
what the rabbit pollution is, but I've been in this
business nearly 40 years, and I've never heard of it. Nor was it clear what
the rest of the passage meant, what a stimulus was,
what does the way in which a stimulus is perceived
mean, and so on. So I did a bit of digging,
went to my books on my shelf, and I found that there
is such a thing called the cutaneous rabbit solution
that works as follows. If someone closes
their eyes then someone else taps them three
times on the wrist, three times of the elbow, three
times on the shoulder. It feels like the series
of taps running up the length of your arm, kind
of like a hopping rabbit. The significance is where you
perceive the early taps depends on the later taps, so
consciousness doesn't simply track events in real time, but
it retrospectively edits them so the way in which you
perceive the tap on the elbow affects where you perceive
the tap on the wrist. Well that's kind of
interesting, but why didn't they just say that? Instead of stimulus this,
and poststimulus that? It would've taken no
more words, and it would have been more scientific,
rather than less scientific, because now a reader has a way
of evaluating the argument. Does that really show
that conscious perception is slow and integrative,
or might there be some alternative explanation? The dangers of the Curse
of Knowledge, for me, are best-illustrated
by an old joke. Where a man walks
into the dining room one of the old
Catskills resorts. And he sees it bunch of
retired Borscht Belt comedians, sitting around a table. He joins them, and
listens to what's going. And one of the old
timers says, 37. And everyone else erupts
in uproarious laughter. Another one says, 112,
again, peels of guffaws. I can't figure out
what's going on, so he asked the guy next to
him, what's happening here? Guys as well get these guys have
been around each other so long but they all know
the same jokes, so to save time they've
given each joke a number. And now, when they want to tell
a joke, all they have to do is recite the number. Guys says, that's
ingenious, let me try it. So he says, 121. Stony silence. 27. Then everyone stares at
him, and no one laughs. He sinks back down to his
seat, and he asks the guy next to him, what
happened, what I do wrong? The guy said, oh, it's
all in how you tell it. But anyway, giving jokes
numbers is what all of us do, all too often without
realizing that others have no way of knowing
what they refer to. Well how do you exercise
the Curse of Knowledge? The traditional
solution is to always keep in mind the reader
over your shoulder. Remember who you
are writing for. Well this is good
as far as it goes. But it doesn't go terribly
far because psychologists have shown that we're actually
not terribly good at guessing other people's knowledge,
even when we try. None of us is blessed with
the gift of clairvoyance, and people are often
over-confident in their ability to define the mental states
of other individuals. But still, it's a start so
for what it's worth, hey, I'm talking to you, your readers
know much less than you think they do and unless you try very
hard to imagine what you know that they don't know who you
are guaranteed to confuse them. But a better way to deal
with the Curse of Knowledge is to actually get a
real live other person, show them a draft, and
see if they can follow it. All too often, one will discover
that what's obvious to you, is not obvious to anyone else. You can also show
a draft to yourself after some time has passed,
and it's no longer familiar. If you're like me you
will find yourself saying, that doesn't follow,
what did I mean by that? And all too often,
who wrote this crap? Most advice on writing
should be interpreted not as advice on how to write
but as advice on how to revise, something that you can
only realize once you have enough distance from
the prose to recognize your own curse of
knowledge and then to apply all of your
cognitive efforts on improving the clarity
of the prose itself. Finally, how should we
think about correct usage? The issue of language that
probably draws more attention than all other writing
issues put together. Now some usages
are clearly wrong. When Cookie Monster
says, me want cookie, the error is so obvious that
it's the basis of the humor that even a preschool
child can appreciate. Similarly, I Can
has Cheezburger, if we did not recognize that
that was a grammatical error, there would be nothing
funny to the extent that there is anything
funny about lolcats and similar internet memes. [LAUGHTER] "Is our children learning?" This is so obviously
a grammatical error that even President
George W Bush, in a self-deprecating speech
called attention to it as an error in making
fun of himself. There are other usages though,
or alleged usage errors that are not so clear. And just to be bipartisan, in
1992 Bill Clinton while running for president, had as
one of his taglines, "Give Al Gore and I a chance
to bring America back." The despised "between you and
I" error which language purists pointed at the time
as a damning sign of his linguistic ineptitude. Another democratic
President, Barack Obama, recently said "No
American should live under a cloud
of suspicion just because of what they look like." The supposed
singular "they" error in which the plural pronoun
they has a singular antecedent, no American. "To boldly go where no
man has gone before." The infamous split infinitive. "You think you lost your love. Well I saw her yesterday. It's you she's thinking of,
and she told me what to say." The preposition at the
end of the sentence. And then the urbane, suave,
sophisticated talk show host from the 1970s, Dick Cavett, in
a recent article for "The New York Times" describing what
it's like to go to his college reunion said, "Checking
into the hotel it was nice to see a few of my
old classmates in the lobby." Any of you spot the
grammatical error in that one? It is the dangling
participle for those of you who went to school in
the 1960s or earlier. Well contested issues
like this have given rise to what journalist sometimes
called The Language War between-- allegedly
between the prescriptivists, and the descriptivists. According to this,
construction on one side there are people
who prescribe how other people ought
to speak and write. Their credo might be summarized
as follows, "Rules of usage are objectively correct. To obey them is to uphold
standards of excellence. To flout them is to dumb
down literate culture, degrade the language, and hasten
the decline of civilization." On the other side are
the descriptivists, who describe how people
do speak and write. Their credo might be
that, "Rules of usage are the secret handshake
of the ruling class. The people should be liberated
to write however they please." Well if this was
a genuine debate, and I suspect it is not,
then the prescriptivists should have said that
the Beatles lyrics should have been "It's you of
whom she's thinking." And the descriptivists
should insist that there is nothing wrong
with, "I can has cheeseburger." Well, this doesn't seem
to be a productive way to analyze problems of usage. And indeed, I think that
this is a false dichotomy. We need a better way of
thinking about usage. Well are rules of usage? What does it mean
to say that I Can has Cheezburger is a grammatical
error or for that matter, give Al Gore and I a chance
to bring America back. These rules, whatever
they are there are not an objective fact
about the physical world that a scientist could go out
and observe with instrument. Nor are they theorems of logic
that a logician could prove. Many people believe
that rules of usage are stipulated by a governing
body, such as the editors of dictionaries, and I can
speak with some authority here to say that
this is not true. I'm the chair of the usage
panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and when I joined,
the first question I asked of the dictionary's editors
was, how do you guys decide what goes
in the dictionary? And the answer was "We pay
attention to the way people use words." That is, when it
comes to English, there's no one in charge. The lunatics are
running the asylum. So what then are
rules of usage given that they are not objective
facts about the world, logical truths, or stipulated
by a governing authority. You can think of them as
tacit-evolving conventions. Convention is a
way of doing things that has no inherent
advantages other than the fact that everyone else has agreed
to abide by them as well. An obvious example
is paper currency, why there's a green, rectangular
piece of paper have value? It's because everyone else
thinks that it has value. Why do we drive
on the right, not because there's anything
superior about the right as opposed to the
left, but there are very good reasons to
drive on the same side than everyone else
is driving on, whichever side it happens to be. There's a joke
about man commuting to work who gets a cell
phone call from his wife. She warns him, honey, I've
been listening to the radio, you should be very careful. There's a maniac on
the highway, he's driving in the wrong
direction on the expressway. And he says, one maniac? There are 100s of them. And the conventions
of usage are tacit, that is they are not
legislated by a governing body, say like the Rules Committee
of Major League Baseball. But they emerge as
a rough consensus within a virtual community
of careful writers without any explicit
deliberation, agreement, or legislation. And it's an evolving
convention in that that consensus may
change over time. So should writers
follow the rules? And the answer is, it depends. Some rules simply extend the
logic of everyday grammar to more complicated cases. Why do we say that, "Is
our children learning?" is grammatically incorrect? Well, it is equivalent to
"Our children is learning," and everyone agrees that,
"Our children is learning." is gramatically incorrect. Similarly, "The impact of the
cuts have not been felt yet." There, it's a little
harder to spot the error, but when you simply take out the
intervening phrase of the cuts you get, "The impact
have not been felt yet," and again it pops
out as an error. The writer was misled by
the adjacent noun, cuts, which is plural into
using a plural verb. Whereas in fact the subject
of the sentence is, impact, a few words upstream,
which is singular. When you get rid of that
intervening phrase then the violation pops out at you. Now you all recognize the
notorious green wiggly line of Microsoft's grammar checker. Probably most of the
green wiggly lines that you will discover
in your drafts consist of errors
of number agreement that you may fail to have
spot because the sentence is inverted, or a few
words get in between. But we can all agree that
these really are errors and they really
should be avoided. Also there are some
prescriptive rules that make important
semantic distinctions. Namely, if you are addressing
a literate leadership, they may have different
interpretation than the one you had in mind. For example, the
word fulsome is not a fancy synonym the word full. If you were to thank someone
for the fulsome letter that they sent you, would
not be praising them, you would not be
praising yourself, because fulsome
does not mean full, it means insincere
or excessively and insincerely flattering. Likewise, simplistic is
not a fancy-schmancy way of saying simple, simplistic
means overly or naively simple. Fortuitous in the expectation
of most literate readers is not another way
of saying fortunate. And if someone is
meritorious, I advise you not to call them meretritious. If you're not sure why,
look it up in a dictionary. In general, English does
not tolerate synonyms that share the same root,
but vary in their suffixes, and so one should
resist the temptation to try to sound
posh on the cheap by using a hoity-toity
version of a familiar word. If you do, you might
elicit the reaction that Vizzini did in
the Princess Bride when he kept using the
word inconceivable to refer to things that just happened. You keep using that word. I do not think it means
what you think it means. On the other hand, not
every grammatical pet peeve, or bit of folklore, or
dimly-remembered lesson from Ms. Thistlebottom's
classroom is a legitimate role of usage. Many of the alleged roles in
fact violate grammatical logic, are routinely flouted
by the best writers, and have always been
flouted by the best writers. An excellent example
being singular they. In a recent rant in a
conservative magazine, one language grump
argued that singular they was an innovation brought
on by radical feminists, and that we should
all try to insert a gender neutral monstrosity
into the English language, and that we should ignore
these radical feminists and instead go back to the pure,
crystalline language of Jane Austen. Well a scholar named
Henry Churchyard in an article called "Everyone
Loves Their Jane Austen" actually went back to
the crystalline prose of Jane Austen and found
that she used singular they no fewer than 87 times. So what's a writer to do? How should a careful writer
distinguish legitimate rules of usage from the bogus ones? Well the answer is
unbelievably simple. Look them up. Look them up in a modern
dictionary or style guide. Many sticklers and snoots
and peasants and peevers assume that any rule
that they remember will be backed up by the major
dictionaries and style manuals. Whereas in fact,
these reference books, which do pay close attention
to English as actually used by competent writers are
the most adamant debunkers of grammatical nonsense. If you look up split infinitive
in the Merriam Webster unabridged, for example,
here's what you will find. "It's all right to
split an infinitive in the interest of clarity. Since clarity is the usual
reason for splitting, this advice means
merely that you can split them
whenever you need to." And you'll get similar
device from American Heritage Dictionary, the Encarta World
English Dictionary, the Random House Dictionary, and so on. Modern dictionaries
and style manuals do not, in fact, ban
split infinitives, singular they, prepositions at
the end of sentences and so on. They represent the difference
between reasoned evidence based usage advice versus kind of
smarty pants one-up-manship. Also, correct usage should
be kept in perspective. So I think it is well
worth keeping in mind correct and incorrect usage. It's the least important
part of good writing. You can obey every rule
that has ever been rooted, and you can still be
a wretched writer. It is far less important
than classic style, overcoming the
Curse of Knowledge. To say nothing of
factual diligence, and keeping ideas and
arguments coherent. Also, even the
most irksome errors are not signs of the
decline of the language. And this is best captured
by an XKCD cartoon by the now bestselling
author Randall Munroe, in which he has a ghost
visiting a language purist and says-- the
ghost says I bring a cautionary vision
of things to come. This is the future. And this is the
future if you give up the fight over the
world literally. That is, they are
exactly the same. So to sum up, I think
that modern linguistics and cognitive science
provide better ways of our enhancing our prose. A model of prose communication,
namely classic style in which language is a
window onto the world. An understanding
of the way language works, in particular
the way that it must convert a web of thoughts
into a linear string of words. A diagnosis of why good
prose is so hard to write, namely the Curse of
Knowledge, and a way to make sense of
rules of correct usage as tacit, evolving conventions. Thank you very much. Any interrogatory
verbalizations? MALE SPEAKER: Thank
you very much. If you have a
question, please step to the stuff to
the microphone so that you can be heard
on the recording, and in remote offices. I do apologize, we won't
have time for many questions, maybe two or three
just because we had-- you cannot have too
much of a good thing, I enjoyed it myself, even though
we went overtime a little bit. So, go ahead. AUDIENCE: Thanks
for a great talk. I have a question,
I've always been interested in how you have
all these curious examples, not just in this presentation
but also in your books-- and I'm curious
how you index them? Do you keep them in your
head or you search for them specifically for
a particular case? STEVEN PINKER: Both. So I have-- for many
years, actually-- literally for
decades, literally. I have-- in the
old days of paper, I used to read
with the scissors, and when I'd come across an
interesting example or a joke I would cut it out, circle it,
put it in a couple of files. Now I can cut and paste
or save digitally. For examples of bad prose,
I have the huge advantage of being an academic. So I swim in the stuff. That was the easy part. And then there are some sites
that I took advantage of. It turns out there's a Pinterest
site, in which a woman just collected every cartoon or
sticker or t-shirt she could find that was about
grammar, and so that was a rich source of grammatical
humor that I can wander. And as I was writing
the book, I especially kept an eye open for examples
that would illuminate a point. So a bit of everything. AUDIENCE: Hi there,
thanks for the great talk. I'm looking forward
to reading the book. Just a small thing
I would say first, but you reminded me
that 15 years ago when I was shopping for a
dictionary in a bookstore, I actually was digging
through the dictionaries and rejecting all the ones
that had incentivize in there as a word, because
it's not a word. But I guess it is
because people use it. STEVEN PINKER: Yes
in fact it is a word. AUDIENCE: Darn it! And also figuratively
versus literally actually has been misused for
a really long time, there's a lot of
history on that. But I was wondering, you
kept talking about language, and I kept wondering,
well this is-- you're talking about
language but you're talking about English. Have you explored anything with
other linguists about problems like this that are similar
in other either Latin based languages, or not
Latin based languages? STEVEN PINKER: I imagine
that much of the advice would carry over. We all comprehend things
using the same brains and the advantage of
allowing your reader to visualize something as
opposed to just spooning out cliches surely holds
in every language. And indeed, classic style which
is the central image from which a lot of these bits of advice
are theorems, are implications. According to Thomas
and Turner, it was actually invented by
the great French essayists of the 17th century. And even though French
style is in many ways different from English
style, they credit writers like Descartes, and
[INAUDIBLE] with coming up with this conceit of pretending
that you're describing a world all the differences
between the French language and English language
clearly did not matter. There are, to be sure, there
must be some differences, especially when it comes to the
way in which the linearization of words in syntax conveys
a tangled web of ideas. Because there there are some
obvious cross linguistic differences. In German for example,
the verb comes at the end of the sentence
instead of the beginning. And so the tips on how to engage
the reader's mind in real time would have to be
modified accordingly. I'll find out when
this book is translated into other languages
how many questions I get and how the translator
will deal with them. As far as the words-- new
words like incentivize go, incentivize actually turns
out to be a pretty useful word because there's
no-- remember, one of the guidelines for writing
is omit needless words. And if you say something
like layout incentives for, that's an awful lot
of needless words. Moreover, when you compress
a phrase into a verb, it adds a semantic difference. Namely that it implies
that there's something that you are directly
and immediately causing. And as we become more aware
that policy changes that may have been thought up
and implemented to achieve some abstract goal may
have perverse results. Because as soon as they
lay out the incentives, people will follow
the incentives. Perhaps doing
something the opposite of what the writers
of legislation intend, the verb incentivize reminds
you that in doing something you are automatically changing
the landscape of options and so it conveys an
additional meaning above and beyond
creating incentives for. AUDIENCE: Right it
makes it active. STEVEN PINKER: Exactly,
it's active, it's direct, it's causal. AUDIENCE: As opposed to
providing incentives. STEVEN PINKER: Exactly. AUDIENCE: Which does
sound kind of passive. I've gotten over it,
it was 15 years ago. So I'm over it now. STEVEN PINKER: In fact so
what you are going through, and probably many
people in this room have gone through
our own lifetimes is what E.B. White never went
through in the transition from to contact as a neologism
to a part of every day English. And so this happens. Whether or not you're
convinced by my arguments that incentivize
is a useful word, it doesn't matter what we think. If people use it, it becomes
entrenched in the language. Yes, the dictionary
writers will include it, they have no choice. There are selling a product
that has to be useful. What does useful mean? You write according to the
way that your readers will expect words to be used. What we do int he American
Heritage Dictionary is that because it's
not-- generally, when you look something
up in a dictionary, you don't care about how
any old person on the street uses language. You have in mind a kind of
virtual audience of readers who care about language, who
expect the writer to take care in their choice of words. So we assembled a sample,
called the usage panel of about 200 journalists,
linguists, sports writers, poets, novelists, kind
of a sample of people who just have shown
they care about words. And we pole them, we ask them,
what do you think incentivize? And their decisions
will determine what goes into the dictionary. And in cases where it's
too close to 50-50, there will be a usage
note that just explains the history of the word,
explains the current reaction, and you-- the writer can then
make an informed decision. AUDIENCE: I went
through my dictionary and put post-it notes on all
my favorites usage notes. STEVEN PINKER: Of
very good, yes. AUDIENCE: To be
graduated from college, as opposed to
graduating from college. STEVEN PINKER: That's
an excellent example, because there, again,
the language is changing, there are purists who would
say it has to be graduated from college, but that's not
the way people talk anymore. AUDIENCE: Thanks very much. STEVEN PINKER: Thank
for your question. MALE SPEAKER: I apologize,
I'm afraid we'll have two more questions, and then
we'll have to move on. AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks for coming,
it's so great to have you here. I studied you a long time ago
in a linguistics course at UCLA. I-- on the subject of usage
and things becoming popular convention, and pet peeves,
I don't know how much you're exposed to what
I call corporate ease , but I think this group knows
that people have started using verbs as nouns, or nouns as
verbs like top asks are top asks in the meeting,
or are learnings. STEVEN PINKER: Asks. AUDIENCE: Asks-- yeah, plural. It's very, very, irritating. Or the learnings that
we got from the trip. Or to architect
something, make it a verb. I want to know if this bothers
you as much as it does me, and if you might consider
making a PSA demanding but this be abolished. STEVEN PINKER: Well
the uh, I can't do it. [LAUGHTER] I'll tell you why. AUDIENCE: You heard this right? STEVEN PINKER: Yeah. Oh yes absolutely. And I have a Dilbert
cartoon where the boss with the pointy hair
asks one of his employees, I would like to task
you with the deliverable and she and she
completely freaks out. My world is falling
apart, task is not a verb. A couple of observations--
one, it's not new. This has been going on, probably
for many number of centuries, probably at least since
the Middle English period or at least early
modern English. Again the reason that Strunk
and White had a problem with to contact is that contact
for them was only a noun, and it was turned into a verb. Now, do any of you have
a problem with contact? I don't have a problem
with to contact. And in fact, if you were to go
through any passage of prose, you would find
probably about a fifth of the verbs started
out life as nouns. We notice the new ones,
but it's a process that's been going on for
a long, long time. it's one of the things
that makes English English. And you often forget how many
verbs from nouns there are. To chair a meeting, to table
the motion, to pen your memoir, to hand me the cookies,
to foot the bill. There are-- it's only the new
ones that get under our skin. It's not that it's inherent
to the English language that verbing a noun
leads to a monstrosity. Then there's a--
but I agree, there's a lot of corporate
prose that is annoying, especially when
it's unnecessary. But there are ones
that will earn a foothold in the language
because as with incentivize they not only capture a meaning
while omitting needless words, but they add the extra
meaning that this is now a conventional,
direct, causal process. And that's why task
started to creep in. Who knows whether it will last,
or be a fad word like some of the ones for
the "Mad Men" era. But there's nothing we
can do, some new verbs will come from nouns
and vice versa. AUDIENCE: Trying to [INAUDIBLE]. STEVEN PINKER: [LAUGHTER] Yes. Last question. Maybe say the serenity
prayer, accept the changes that you can't do
anything about. AUDIENCE: So you mentioned
literally a couple times, and how horrifying it can be. And there's also
some other words like that have evolved to use be
used the opposite of what they mean, like peruse, people use to
mean scan quickly when it means to pour over in detail. STEVEN PINKER: Yes, peruse. AUDIENCE: I'm all for the
evolution of language, but it seems like
not really productive to have words evolve to mean
the opposite of what they mean. And I was wondering what
you think about that. STEVEN PINKER: Right. Well there is this
category sometimes called a contranyms or autoantonyms. Things like to dust,
which can either mean to put dust on,
as in crop dusting, or to take dust
away as in a duster. To sanction, to table. Often what happens
is that words will-- a word will start off and then
have varies near synonyms that have slightly different
meanings and then one meaning will give rise
to another until they meet and have sentences that
are the direct opposite. It doesn't happen all that
often and usually these things are clear in context. The vast majority of words
have more than one meaning. You just flip over
dictionary to any word, and it's meaning one,
meaning two, meaning three, and generally they are
distinguished by context. They can survive side by
side, so the word literate can mean either actually
capable of reading, or it could mean sophisticated. Conservative can
mean on the right of the American
political spectrum or resistant to change. And so you have
conservative liberal, and it's not an oxymoron. So word meanings can coexist. In terms of doing
something about it I quote the famous exchange
between Margaret Fuller who once wrote, I
accept the universe. And Thomas Carlyle who
said, god, you better. Language change is
going to happen, and there's almost nothing
that one can do about it. It doesn't mean that language
degenerates or deteriorates though because often the
sloppy meanings that we dislike can survive side by side
with the precise meaning that we do like. And it's interesting to go
back in the history of usage and find the same issues
that annoy people today were annoying people
a century ago. So if you're one of the
people-- one of those who likes the word disinterested to mean
without a vested interest as opposed to being a
synonym for bored. And you worry if people use
disinterested to mean cored, we're going to lose that lovely
word disinterested meaning unbiased or without
a best interest. But people have been
using disinterested to mean bored for
centuries, and we still have the more precise meaning
without a vested interest in. So language change does not
imply language degeneration. Often the more precise
word is available. And literally is another
example, a lot of people use it to me as a kind
of an intensifier, a bit of hyperbole. But there's still cases
in which you use literally to mean literally
it's clear in context that that's the way
you're using it. MALE SPEAKER: Thank you
very much, Professor Pinker, it's been a joy. And thank you all for coming.
The lecture, given by Steve, was good.
"Don't, make a video" is a short book.