The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

each year Microsoft Research hosts hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available so it's an honor today to have Steven Pinker with us Steven is an experimental psychologist and perhaps the world's foremost writer on language thinking and human nature as you can pick up very easily from his writings over the last 20 years he's interested in all aspects of language and mind steven is currently Johnstone family professor of psychology at Harvard University I was looking over his history this morning preparing this introduction and for many of us at Microsoft Research I find his his academic and life history interesting he earned a bachelor's degree in Experimental Psychology at McGill and then moved to Cambridge Massachusetts in 1976 where he spent time as he says bouncing back and forth between Harvard and MIT most most of his initial research working with Steven kosslyn and others was in visual cognition including the ability to imagine shapes recognize faces in object objects and to direct attention within a visual field he earned his doctorate at Harvard in 1979 he did a postdoc at MIT and then a year as an assistant professor at Harvard in 1982 he moved back to MIT where he stayed until 2003 when he returned to Harvard University so almost to the month 20 years ago he published started publishing the first of several wonderful books written for general audiences and this was the start of a string of hits these include the language instinct how the mind works words and rules the blank slate the stuff of thought and recently the better angels of our nature his latest book which we'll talk about today which I can't wait to read is the sense of style the thinking persons guide to writing in the 21st century now we ought to listen very carefully to him today beyond general interest steven has chaired the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary so know if he's talking about here he's helping to define the dictionary here and in terms of usage and he's been also served as editor for various groups that we all respect the NSF triple-a s and the APA before starting I'd like to sort of mention a little bit about the human side of Steven I am last April he and I would did an event together in Arizona called the origins meeting and I dragged my son along with me because the deal was for the organizer Lawrence Krauss that my son had to come with me because this is a college tour I'll show up and do this event but my son must must come with me so so Zachary hung out with me at this meeting and and this is Steven and Zachary hanging on already said at a reception here McKenna advance the slide here that's okay I'll just uh here we go but just I caught them at a reception and just uh Steven was so engaged with Zachary exactly a lots of questions he was 11th grader then about cognition and the mind and you see how seriously Steven takes Zachary's thoughts he's very interested in people and how they think and in the individuals and it's great to see how engaged he can be with people of all ages so let's give a warm welcome here to Steven Pinker thank you very much Eric why is so much writing so bad and how can we make it better why do we have to put so much effort into deciphering a legal contract such such as the revocation by these regulations of a provision previously revoked subject to savings does not effect the continued operations why is it so hard to penetrate a typical academic article such as it is the moment of non-construction disclosing the absent ation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize in reading the helplessness of its fall into conceptuality why is it so hard to set the time on a digital alarm clock well there's no shortage of theories out there and probably the most popular one is captured in this cartoon in which a boss says to the to the tech writer good start needs more gibberish in other words that bad writing is a deliberate choice but bureaucrats insist on gibberish to evade responsibility it's the Revenge of the Nerds if pasty-faced tech writers get their revenge on their girls who turned them down on dates in high school or the jocks are kicked sand in their faces pseudo-intellectuals try to bamboozle their readers with highfalutin gobbledygook disguising the fact that they have nothing to say well I have no doubt that the bamboozlement theory is true for some writers some of the time but it's also true that good people can write bad prose I know many scientists who have plenty to say they do groundbreaking research on important topics they have no need to impress nothing to hide but still they're writing stinks are they there's another theory which I'm sure many of you are familiar with which is that it's digital media that are ruining the language Google is making us stupid the digital age stupefies young americans and jeopardizes our future Twitter forces us to write and therefore think in 140 characters well I think there's a problem with the dumbest generation theory as well which is that it makes an empirical prediction namely that it was all better before the digital age that is and you remember what life was like many of you were old enough before instant messaging and email back in the 1980s those were the days in which teenagers spoke in fluid power graphs bureaucrats wrote in clear English and every academic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay remember those days or was it the 1970s well maybe you have to go back even further like the 1960s well in those days they were saying things like 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 invention of TV and radio say to 1917 well in those days you would hear from every college in the country goes up the cry our freshmen can't spell can't punctuate every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments well maybe we have to go back even further to the age of the Enlightenment for example they said our language is degenerating very fast I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it and then there are the ancient grammar police who said Oh for crying out loud you never end a sentence with a little birdie the thing is that writing bad writing has burdened readers in every time in every generation and my favorite theory begins with an observation from Charles Darwin that man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble 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 the your reader is unknown invisible inscrutable they exist only in the writers imagination they can't react to prose in real time or break in or ask for clarification and so writing is an act of pretense and writing is an act of craftsmanship so what can we do to improve the craft of writing well for many decades there was a single answer to this question namely you give students or aspiring writers this the iconic elements of style by William Strunk junior and professor at Cornell and his student EB white the beloved author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little and a longtime New Yorker essayist note 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 now there's plenty of good sense in the elements of style and it is it is worth reading today they have little gems of advice like use definite specific concrete language right with nouns and verbs put the emphatic words at the end and my favorite their prime directive omit needless words which is a excellent example of itself no needless words there on the other hand for all its fame I think the elements of style can't be the basis for writing advice in the 20th century for one thing it is filled with 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 3 people or 10 people or 20 people why well if of 6 people 5 went away how many people would be left answer one people did you get that by the same logic you should never say I have three children or 32 teeth it just makes no sense 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 what happens if you don't care whether someone in phones another person or meets them or messages them or emails them or tweets them to contact happen to be a neologism in the day of professor Strunk and to his ear it sounded like faddish business jargon since then the word has passed into common usage precisely because it's so useful namely there are times where you don't care how one person is going to get in touch with someone else as long as they do so and so the contact has been become completely unexceptionable note that the word clever means one thing when applied to people another one apply to horses a clever horse is a good-natured one not an ingenious one the problem with traditional style advice is that it consists of an arbitrary list of do's and dont's based on the tastes and P's of the author's it is not grounded in a principled understanding of how language works and as a result users have no way of understanding and assimilating the advice and as I will try to show you much of the advice is just plain wrong I think we can do better today we can base advice on the science and scholarship of language on modern grammatical theory which provides ways of just talking about syntax that are more suitable than the old grammars based on Latin in evidence-based dictionaries and grammars research from cognitive science on what makes sentence is easy or hard to read and historical and critical studies of usage and that's what I've tried to do in the sense of style it all begins with a model of effective prose as I've mentioned writing is an unnatural act good style requires above all some coherent mental model of the communication scenario what the writer is trying to accomplish my favorite of these models comes from a book called clear and simple as the truth from the illiterate literary scholars from C Noel Toma and Mark Turner and they call it classic style the model behind classic style is that prose is a window onto the world the writer sees something in the world he positions the reader so that she can see it with her own eyes the reader and writer are equals the goal is to help the readers see an objective reality and the stylist conversation well that all sounds pretty obvious so what's what's the alternative well it turns out there's a range of alternative styles such as what they call contemplative style or ocular style practical style' the one that many of us are familiar with from academia is what they call postmodern or self-conscious style in which the writers chief if unstated concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naivete about his own and as Toma and Turner 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 is 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 those questions up it could never get around to treating its subject and its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject and since the whole idea behind classic prose is you show the reader something in the world I would be hypocritical if I didn't at least give you an example of classic prose the example that I picked comes from an article in Newsweek magazine by the physicist Brian Greene on the theory of inflationary cosmology and one of its possible implications namely multiple universes or the multiverse so green one little excerpt from this article he writes if space is now expanding then at even or 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 have been compressed to an infinitesimal speck that then swelled outward evolving into the universe as we know it the Big Bang Theory was born yet scientists were aware that the Big 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 Green does not pause to apologize about how terribly complicated and abstract the various equations are he presents the reader with an image that they can see for themselves if you can imagine space expanding you can run the mental movie backward and realize that it must have all begun with a spec that then expanded outward also the Farrelly abstruse concept of mathematical equations breaking down which a typical reader of Newsweek might have trouble appreciating he illustrates with a an exact example namely if you pull out your calculator and you put 1 divided by 0 you get an error message you can see it for yourself or for that matter you can even just contemplate the paradox or the conceptual difficulty of dividing the number 1 into 0 parts either way the reader can appreciate for himself or herself the what the concept have an equation breaking down is many examples of writing advice are implications of the model behind classic prose number one in classic prose the focus is on the thing being shown not the activity of studying yet namely the writer's job peer group daily activities and other professional concerns but let me give you a somewhat contrived example of the opening of a typical review article that I might have to endure in reading the professional literature in my own field 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 no offense but very few people are really interested in how professors spend their time a more classic way of opening the same article might have been all children acquire the ability to speak and understand a language without explicit lessons how do they accomplish this feat a corollary of this advice is to minimize the kind of apologizing that seems mandatory in academic prose again I'll give you a somewhat but only somewhat contrived example 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 in the concept of children there is much uncertainty about the interpretation of experimental data and a great deal of controversy surrounding the theories more research needs to be done well this is the kind of paragraph that could be deleted without los classic prose gives the reader credit for knowing that many concepts are hard to define and many controversies are hard to resolve the reader is there to see what the writer will do about it another corollary is to minimize the reflexive hedging that you see in many kinds of professional ease the almost robotic use of fluffy little words that are jammed into prose to make it seem as if the writer doesn't really mean what he's saying somewhat fairly nearly seemingly in part relatively comparatively predominantly to some extent so to speak presumably and the similar device of the use of shutter quotes to make it seem as if the the writer doesn't actually mean words in their literal senses I'll just give you an example this is from a letter of recommendation that I received for I got it she is a quick study and has been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her well are we supposed to interpret this as saying that this young woman is a quick study or that she is a quick study mainly someone who is rumored or alleged to be a quick study but maybe isn't and the virtually does this mean that there are some areas that she's interested in that she just hasn't bothered to educate herself in the unthinking use of hedges was brought home to me when I met a colleague at a conference and I asked her how she was doing and she pulled out a picture of her four-year-old daughter and she said we virtually adore her why the compulsive hedging well in many bureaucracies there is a well-known abbreviation cya cover your anatomy but there is an alternative so sue me it is often better to be clear and possibly wrong than fuzzy and not even wrong ah also a good writer counts on the cooperative nature of ordinary conversation conversation could not proceed unless there was a certain amount of charity between reader and writer if someone says these days in the recent years Americans are getting fatter you don't interpret that as meaning as every last member of the 300 million American population has been getting fatter you automatically interpret it as meaning on average or more or less without explicitly having to say so a second feature of classic prose is they the writer has to keep up the illusion that the reader is seeing a world rather than just listening to verbiage and as a result is a classic piece of advice for writers avoid cliches like the plague and we're all familiar with the writer who says things like we needed to keep the ball rolling in our search for the Holy Grail but found that it was neither a magic bullet nor a slam dunk so he rolled with the punches and let the chips fall where they may while seeing the glass of as half-full it's a no brainer if you simply ladle out one cliche after another the reader is forced to turn off their visual cortex and just process it as la blah blah if the reader then does pay attention a cliche monger is likely to inadvertently produce ludicrous images in the form of mixed metaphors like it's also from a letter of recommendation Jeff is a Renaissance man drilling down to the core issues and pushing the envelope you can do both or no one has yet invented a condom that will knock people's socks off and again if you use words without being mindful of the images they convey you will be eligible for membership in awful Americans who figuratively use literally so it's perfectly fine to say she literally blushed it is not as good to say she literally exploded and it's very very bad to say she literally emasculated him you classic prose is about the world it's not about the conceptual tools with which we understand the world and so it calls for avoiding meta concepts that is concepts about concepts that are all too familiar in professional pros like approach assumption concept condition context framework issue level model perspective process rules strategy tendency variable all of which are almost always completely dispensable from pros so instead of this for example is by a legal scholar in the New York Times who writes I have serious doubts that trying to amend the Constitution would work on an actual level on the aspirational level however a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable which could just as easily but have been stated as 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 the law enforcement perspective that is when dealing with an unstable person we must consult psychiatrists but we may also have to inform the police finally classic prose narrates ongoing events we see agents performing actions that affect objects non classic prose tends to thing off' i events and then refer to the event using a dangerous tool of English grammar called nominalization turning something into a noun there are a variety of ways in which English allows you to take a perfectly spry verb and by adding a suffix like Asian or IO n or or mint you can embalm it as a lifeless noun so instead of competing you engage in competition instead of organizing something you bring about the organization of it Helen sword a an English scholar or 1st of them as zombie nouns because they kind of lumber across the scene without any conscious agent actually directing an action and they can turn prose into a Night of the Living Dead prevention of neurogenesis diminished social avoidance meaning when we prevented New Year neurons from forming they mice no longer avoided other mice or subjects were tested under conditions of good - excellent acoustic isolation to wit we tested the students in a quiet room so characteristic of academic prose is the use of meta concepts and nominalizations that we all can recognize the humor behind this old editorial cartoon in which you have a bearded active academic explaining the reason verbal SAT scores are at an all-time low in complete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximise acquisition of awareness and utilization of communication skills personal into standardized review and assessment of language and old development any interrogatory verbalizations it's not just academics who fall into the habit of thing affine actions politicians do it as well such as Texas Governor Rick Perry who when a storm threatened the Republic Republican National Convention said right now there is not any anticipation that there will be a cancellation that is right now we don't anticipate that we will have to cancel it and corporate consultants a young man explaining to a reporter what he did for a living said I made digital and social media strategist I deliver programs products and strategies to our corporate clients across the spectrum of communications functions and when the reporter pressed him about what he really did he finally broke down and said I teach big companies how to use and our product engineers portable generators used to carry the following warning mild exposure to CEO can result in accumulated damage over time extreme exposure to CEO may rapidly be fatal without producing significant warning symptoms yeah yeah and as a result several hundred Americans every year would asphyxiate themselves and their families by running portable generators indoors more recently the if you buy a portable generator it will have this on its sticker using a generator indoors can kill you in minutes classic pros so classic pros can literally be a matter of life and death yes literally okay well I promise that a better understanding of language can lead to better writing advice and let me give you an example another notorious contributor to zombie pros is the passive voice the difference between the dog bit the man an active sentence and the man was bitten by the dog a passive sentence it has long been observed 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 lawyers if the outstanding balises is pre paid in full the unearned finance charge will be refunded and of course political officials you might recognize this person Julia Pierson the recently former director of The Secret Service when called upon to explain how it is that a man with a knife managed to vault over the White House fence run across the lawn into the White House and get near the Oval the president's bedroom all the time with a with a knife and not I'll be stopped until someone finally tackled him she explained mistakes were made Ivy what linguist sometimes call the evasive passive and so all the classic guides warn writers from using the passive voice such as Strunk and white they say 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 such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard well I heard some scattered titters through the room I'm coming from people who realize that in fact this passage warns against the passive using the passive the other obligatory reading for every college freshman in a writing class is the classic essay by George Orwell politics in the English language in which he too notes that mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose modern by the way being late 1940s 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 passage that has not one but two instances of the passive voice warning readers never to use the passive voice so what's going on well the passive could not have survived in the English language for 1500 years if it did not serve some purpose and so why can't we do without it it comes down to the very design of language you can think of language as an African vertigo web of knowledge into a string of words the writers knowledge can be modeled as a semantic network that's the way cognitive psychologists and many AI researchers as you all know have done done for 50 or 60 years that is a person's knowledge to a first approximation can be thought of as a number of concepts that are interlinked by various conceptual and logical relationships about doer done to is it looks like and so on well what happens when you have to take a portion of this network and transmit it from one mind to another well you have to code it into a sentence which is a linear string a word in by the way she's mentioned sorry that this fragment of a semantic network might be a crude approximation of a person's knowledge of the tragic events of Oedipus Rex as brought to life by Sophocles in his play of that name but when we convey it that some of those thoughts to others we have to linearize it in sy in Sophocles play Oedipus married his mother and killed his father one word after another that means that there is an inherent problem in the design of language namely that the order of words in a sentence has to do two things at once on the one hand it serves as a code for meaning it indicates who did what to whom but necessarily it presents some bits of information to the reader before others and therefore it effects how the information is absorbed by the reader in real-time in general the earlier material in the sentence looks backward it is the topic it's the what the reader is looking at the later material in the sentence is the focus the new information that is being added what the reader should now notice and prose that violates these principles of linear ordering will feel choppy or disjointed or incoherent this brings us to what the passive is good for namely it allows the writer to convey the same semantic information as the active namely who did what to whom but in a different surface order one that allows the writer to start with the done two rather than the doer so avoid the passive is bad advice if it's offered across the board the passive is the better construction when the done to is currently the focus of the readers mental gaze and again let me give you an example I'm gonna read a little passage from the Wikipedia plot summary of Oedipus Rex spoiler alert from the epiphany the climactic scene in which the tragic backstory of Oedipus is gradually revealed a messenger arrives from Corinth it emerges that he was formerly a shepherd on Mount and during that time he was given a baby the baby says was given to him by another Shepherd from the layest household who had been told to get rid of the child now notice that this passage has three passives in a row the passage begins a messenger arrives from Corinth so we are all now looking at the messenger he has entered the stage well it's natural to use a passive he was given a baby we're already looking at him well now we're looking at the baby and so the next sentence ought to begin with the baby and the passive voice makes that possible the baby was given to the messenger by another Shepherd well now another Shepherd is on the stage our eyes are on the other Shepherd and so it's natural to begin the next sentence with that and again the passive voice makes that possible the other Shepherd had been told to get rid of the child perfectly coherent now let's say you followed the advice to convert passives to actives the passage would read the messenger arrives it emerges that he was formerly a shepherd on Mount Catherine and that during that time someone gave him a baby another shepherd from the last household he says whom someone had told to get rid of a child gave the baby to him now I submit that this is not an improvement because it violates the orderly progression of the readers attention from one entity to another a writer is a bit like a cinematographer who has to be careful as to where the camera is pointing more generally English syntax provides writers with constructions that vary 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 he can absorb them well this then does bring us back to the initial question if the passive is so indispensable why is it so common in bad writing well it's because good writers narrate a story 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 begin with the outcome of an event because they know how it turned out and then they throw in the cause and afterthought and the passive makes that all too easy okay this brings me to part three is why do writers do that why is it so hard for writers to use the resources of language to convey ideas effectively my favorite explanation is called the curse of knowledge the aspect of our psychology in which it's hard 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 or the hindsight bias and a lovely illustration comes from a classic experiment known to every intro psych student where sometimes called the false belief task a child comes into the lab you hand him a box of candy say a box of M&Ms he opens it and he's surprised to find that inside it there isn't candies but rather ribbons so he put the ribbons back in the box close it back up again you say well now another little boy is gonna come to the lab Jason what does he think is in the box and the child will say ribbons even though of course Jason would have no eye no way of knowing if the child knows that he can't imagine what it's like for someone not to know it fact if you ask the first child what did you think was in the box when you came into the room the child will say ribbons he can no longer recover the state at which he did not know that that the box had been tampered with well we adults outgrow this stage a little because many studies have shown that there are versions of the curse of knowledge that apply to grownups we attribute our own vocabulary to others our own factual knowledge our own technical skill the more experienced someone has had with a gadget like a cell phone the less time they think it will take for someone else to learn how to use it I believe that the curse of knowledge is the chief contributor to opaque writing and for that matter opaque product design instructions and so on software interfaces etc it just doesn't occur to the writer that readers haven't learned their jargon don't know the intermediate steps that seem too obvious to mention can visualize a scene that is currently in the writers mind's eye and so the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon or spell out the logic or supply the concrete details and again I'm going to give you an example many professionals and academics excuse themselves from bad writing by saying well I'm writing for my peers and they know all of the concepts so it would only insult them if I were to spell them out that is patently untrue a I'm sure many of you repeatedly find yourself baffled by prose that is actually written for specifically for you and I'll give you an example of an article on consciousness from a journal called trends in cognitive science which is written for people like me and here's how it goes the slow and integrative nature of conscious perception is confirmed behaviorally by observations such as the rabbit illusion and its and its variants where the way in which a stimulus is ultimately perceived is influenced by post stimulus events arising several hundreds of milliseconds after the original stimulus well I read that and I processed the verbiage but I really did not know what it meant beginning with the fact that the writer just assumed that everyone would know what the rabbit illusion was I've been in this business for 35 years I teach undergraduates I teach the perception I never heard of the rabbit illusion so I went to the books and indeed I found there's something called a cutaneous rabbit illusion that works as follows if a person closes their eyes and then the experimenter taps them three times on the wrist and then three times on the elbow and then three times in the shoulder the person will experience it as a series of taps running up the length of their arm like a hopping rabbit and okay that's interesting because it means that where you perceive the earlier taps depends on the location of the later taps so consciousness does not track sensation in real time but it's kind of edited after the fact to make a continuous experience so why didn't I say that the expression tap on the wrist is no less scientific than stimulus and tap on the elbow is no more precise than post stimulus event indeed not only is it no less scientific it's more science because now a pure scientist can evaluate the argument and decide whether that really does show that conscious perception is slow or integrative as opposed to some alternative explanation my favorite way of summing up the curse of knowledge comes from an old joke where a man is visiting a Catskills resort and walks into the dining room and he comes across a bunch of retired borscht belt comedians talking around a table he sits himself down and one of them says 37 and the others break on the top Laureus laughter no this is 112 and again general hilarity you can't you know figure out what's going on so you ask the guy next to him what what's happening here guy says well you know these old-timers have been together for so long that they all know each other's jokes so to save time they've given every joke a number now all they have to do is recite the number guy says that's ingenious I'll try it see he calls up 44 stony silence 87 everyone stared at him and no one laughed sort of sank down into his chair and he asked his companion what happened what did I do wrong I said oh it's all in the way you tell it how do you exercise the curse of knowledge well the traditional solution is always keep in mind the reader over your shoulder that is empathize put yourself in their shoes walk a mile in their moccasins feel their pain and so on well that's ok as far as it goes but the problem is that none of us has extrasensory perception and we're actually not very good at guessing other people's knowledge even when we try but it is a start so for what it's worth I will share with you the advice your readers your users no less than you think you do and unless you at least try to imagine what it's like to be them you're guaranteed to confuse them a better solution is to close the loop and show a draft to a representative reader or user and you'll often be surprised to find that what's obvious to you is not obvious to anyone else or ignition show draft to yourself after some time has passed and it's no longer familiar if you're like me you'll find yourself thinking what did I mean by that that doesn't follow and all too often who wrote this crap and then rewrite ideally several times with a single goal just making the prose understandable to the reader finally how should we think about correct usage which is the aspect of writing that by far gets the most attention now there are some usages that are clearly wrong when a Cookie Monster says me want cookie the reason that even a preschooler will laugh is that the preschooler knows that Cookie Monster has made a grammatical error likewise there would be no humor such as it is in law cats such as I Can Has Cheezburger unless we sense that this is violates the rules of English grammar is our children learning even george w bush acknowledged that this was a grammatical error in a self-deprecating speech he gave a year later on the other hand there are other alleged errors of usage that are not so clear and just to be nonpartisan I will show you a democratic president Bill Clinton who when running for office in 1992 had the catchphrase give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back which some purists would say contains a grammatical error this is also known as the between you and I error another Democratic president barack obama recently said no American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like which some English teachers would say contains a error in number agreement the plural pronoun they is being forced into agreement with the singular antecedent no American sometimes called the singular of a construction to boldly go where no man has gone before the famous split infinitive you think you lost your love well I saw her yesterday eh it's you she's thinking of and she told me what to say eh ending a sentence with a preposition and then some of you may have heard of the suave urbane articulate 1970s talk-show host Dick Cavett who in a recent article in The Times reminiscing about a college reunion said checking into the hotel it was nice to see a few of my old classmates in the lobby anyone see spot the grammatical error in that sentence dangling modifier yes indeed well this these kind of disputed usages have given rise to something some call the language war between the so called prescriptivists and descriptivists now according to this construction the prescriptivists are those who prescribe how language how people ought to speak their position they're also known as the purists ticklers peasants fever snobs snoots nit pickers traditionalists language police usage nannies grammar nazis and gotcha gang according to whom the rules of usage are objectively correct to obey them is to uphold standards of excellence to float them is to dumb down literate culture degrade the language and hasten the decline of civilization then on the other side there are the descriptivists those who describe howling how people do speak who believe that the rules of usage are nothing more than the secret handshake of the ruling class the people should be liberated to write however they please well the reasons to think that this is a really a pseudo controversy and false dichotomy if it were really true then prescriptivists would insist that the lyrics - she loves you should have been it's you of whom she's thinking and descriptivists would say that there is nothing wrong with I Can Has Cheezburger which can't be right otherwise it wouldn't even have a claim to being funny so I think we need a more sophisticated way of thinking about usage than this false dichotomy that Benj end up by various journalists well what are rules of usage they're certainly not an objective fact about the world that you could go out and measure with an instrument like a physical scientist they are not a theorem of logic that you could prove nor contrary to popular opinion are they officially regulated by dictionaries it's not as if they're every year the dictionaries get around a table and legislate on what is correct or incorrect in English I can speak with some authority here because I'm the chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary when I first joined I asked the editors so how do you guys decide what goes into the dictionary and they said we pay attention to the way people use language in other words when it comes to what's correct in English there's no one in charge the the lunatics are running the asylum so what are rules of usage they are tacit evolving conventions convention is a way of doing something that has no inherent advantage other than the fact that everyone else is doing it the same way paper currency is a classic example there's nothing valuable about a green piece of paper other than the fact that everyone else treats it as valuable or driving on the right there is no inherent reason to drive on the right as opposed to the left but on the other hand there's a very good reason to do it the same way everyone else is doing it as illustrated in a joke in which a man is driving to work and he gets a cell phone call from his wife and his wife says oh be careful honey I've been listening to the radio and they say that there is a maniac out there driving in the wrong direction on the freeway and he says what maniac there are hundreds of them unlike traffic rules though the conventions of language are tacit don't ever decides they emerge as a rough consensus within a community of careful writers without explicit deliberation agreement or legislation and they're evolving the consensus may indeed does change over time to contact starts out life as a bit of business jargon it then becomes a standard so should writers follow these rules and the answer is it depends there are some rules that just extend the logic of everyday grammar to more complicated cases is our children learning how do we know that that's an error why did george w bush good-naturedly concede that it's an error well because it's simply a version of our children is learning and everyone agrees that our children is learning is an error therefore the inverted version must also be an error I think you guys have all seen this thing here lean green wiggly line in my experience most of the Microsoft grammar checker green wiggly lines flag errors of agreement and actually do so quite well likewise here's another appearance of the green wiggly line the impact of the cuts have not been felt yet this too when you think about it actually is does violate a rule of English grammar because the it should be the impact of the cuts has not been felt the problem is that the writer was distracted by the adjacent word cuts in the plural sitting right next to the verb the verb should agree with the subject of the sentence not with the noun adjacent to it as you can see if you simply leave out the subordinate prepositional phrase and if you say the impact have not been felt yet that just pops out as an error and that is why we all agree that the impact of the cuts have not been felt is likewise an error another case is that many rules make important semantic distinctions if you thank someone for the fulsome introduction they gave you you are not complimenting either the introducer or yourself because Folsom does not mean full complete rich it means insincere excessively unctuous or or necessarily flattering likewise if something is if you call something simplistic as a way of complimenting it you will make a similar blunder simplistic clearly means overly simple or naive and if something is has much merit you should not call it meretricious look it up you'll see why not in general it is a good idea when choosing a word not to simply assume that if if it's a familiar word with some fancy schmancy suffix at the end it's a posh or hoity-toity way to refer to the same thing in general words with different endings mean different things and you will get yourself in trouble if you use them in a way that your readers will not expect at the same time hope yes so you will be in danger of courting the response that inigo montoya gave to wit see me in the Princess Bride after Vizzini repeatedly used the word inconceivable for things that just happened I said you keep using that word I do not think it means what you think it means at the same time not every pet peeve bit of grammatical folklore or dimly remembered lesson from miss thistle bottoms English classroom is a legitimate rule of usage and when scholars track down these rules they find many of them violate grammatical logic are routinely flouted by the best writers and have always been floated by the best writers a nice example being singular they a recently a language grump wrote that this is a part of a conspiracy by feminists to violate the English language to give people a way to refer to people of indeterminate gender and that we should all go back to the crystalline prose of Jane Austen whoops in an essay called everyone loves their Jane Austen a literary scholar notes that she used singular they no fewer than 87 times in her prose such as everybody began to have their vexation you think you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition well maybe then you could improve on Shakespeare's prose when he wrote we are such stuff as dreams are made on and the same is true of infinitives dangling participles between you and I and many other alleged errors indeed it's not just that you shouldn't bother to obey bogus rules if you obey them you can make your prose worse take this sentence from a press release from Harvard University my employer David Rockefeller has pledged 100 million dollars to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates now I don't know what language that is it ain't English what happened was the writer wet twisted himself into a pretzel to avoid the split infinitive to dramatically increase learning opportunities and in obeying this completely bogus rule turned his own sentence into word salad and it gets even worse because obeying bogus rules can actually lead to a crisis of governance literally in 2009 Chief Justice John Roberts who is a famous stickler for grammar torturing his law clerks and associates by sending back everything they wrote with lots of grammatical errors circled he was in charge of administering the oath of office to Barack Obama inaugurating him as president and what he the wording he should have used as stipulated by the Constitution were I Barack Obama do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States Roberts abandoned his strict constructionism unilaterally amended the Constitution unsplit a split verb and have him say I Barack Obama do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully now not only is this not a stylistic improvement over the what the framers originally framed but it led to possible questions about the legitimacy of the transition of power and to avoid kind of birthers on steroids question being whether he really was president they had to repeat the oath of office in a private ceremony later that afternoon so how should a careful writer distinguish the legitimate rules of usage from the bogus ones and the answer is unbelievably simple look them up if you look up split infinitive in Merriam Webster's unabridged dictionary what it will say is it's alright to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity since clarity is the usual reason for splitting this advice means merely then you can split them whenever you need to and you'll get the same advice from the American Heritage Dictionary the Encarta world English Dictionary the Random House dictionary and so on contrary to most people's beliefs modern dictionaries and style manuals do not ratify pet peeves grammatical folklore or bogus rules they will not settle barroom bets in favor of the pendant or stickler because they are based on evidence on how great writers write when there are marginal cases they will be explicitly discussed in usage notes indicating what the controversy is and what a reader can expect so they are not a kind of backup for smartypants one-upmanship while also correct usage should be kept in perspective though I think it is well worth knowing what the prescriptively ordain rules are they're the least important part of good writing they pale in significance behind classic style overcoming the curse of knowledge to say nothing of factual diligence and coherent ideas and arguments and not even the most irksome errors are signs of the decline of language and this is beautifully illustrated by Randall Munroe in an xkcd cartoon in which a purist is visited by a ghost in his sleep who brings a cautionary vision of things to come this is the future and this is the future if you give up the fight over the word literally as you can see they are exactly the same so to sum up modern linguistics and cognitive science I argue provide better ways of enhancing our prose a model of prose communication specifically classic style language used as a window onto the world an understanding of the way language works in particular that language has to convert a web of thoughts into a 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 correct usage namely as tacit evolving conventions thank you very much any interrogatory verbalizing she's thinking a really petty detail you seem to care about subject for a number of free men but pronoun a decedent agreement because I'm worried about where you're just saying no yes the subject agreement is a process of grammar it's within a single clause pronoun antecedent agreement is much more fluid and moreover it's actually I think it's actually a mistake to call they in and everywhere you know yeah so called singular they construction a plural pronoun it is a so if you say everyone returned to their seats or no American should be under a cloud of suspicion because of what they look like they is not referring to a group of individuals they is basically a bound variable everyone return to their seats means for all X everyone returned to X's seat of X return to exit seat and that's really what it's doing and so I think it's actually a bit of a misnomer even to call it a failure of agreement of number it doesn't really have a number in the classic sense and I have a discussion in the book of how a large number of usage controversies come from the fact that from a kind of bug in the design of English namely English forces you to dichotomize all entities all things you ever want to refer to into the two categories one and more than one and logically speaking there are many many things that you might want to talk about for which that isn't if there's no answer to that question like zero is zero so for none there's some people say that none has to be used in a singular none of them is coming as opposed to none of them are coming well none refers to zero is zero one or zero more than one there's no answer to that or likewise a bound variable if is X singing refer to one thing or too many things well neither it just is a way of carrying over reference to something in a logical expression and a huge number probably 25 different usage controversies come over the fact that that semantically the world doesn't come in two in one in more than one but many English constructions seem to force you in that direction yes Oh writings been going on for a very long time and I'm wondering what the whether on balance you think that writing is getting better and secondly how much do you think your book is going to move the needle it's hard to answer that question just because there's no one thing called writing because there's everything from you know note scrawled on a napkin that you leave for your roommate to State of the Union address or a funeral oration I don't think that in that in general writing is declined there's no reason to think that it that it has more people are writing more things than ever before this has occurred in several pulses both with the expansion of literacy it used to be 75 years ago that a large percentage of the population never entered high school and they were functionally illiterate fewer and fewer people are functionally illiterate surveys of student turn papers have shown that there has been no decline of quality in terms of note number of errors per page the and there's a lot of good prose around its I'm often even though there's a lot of bad prose around I mean there's a lot of you know ranting of by trolls of below the comment line known and you read a typical product review on Amazon or Wikipedia entry and it's it's pretty clear and surprisingly few errors of grammar spelling punctuation I think one possible change is that it's I haven't seen a quantitative study of this but often the best language seems to be more colorless and lip than some of the language of you know a century or a couple of centuries ago you read you know Adam Smith or David Hume or Edmund work granted you're picking kind of the greatest hits of that era but there's a car there's a vividness willingness to use metaphor and literary flourishes that you are less likely to see today I think my hunch is so you know you might refer to the a particle of the dove needed into our bosom together with the elements of the world wolf and the serpent and now we would say something like you know humans have some pro-social tendencies together with you know aggression it may be because we have so many technical terms available to us that we don't reach for the metaphor and that will drain prose of some of its vitality even though it kind of makes it more less effortful to convey abstract ideas yes what do you favorite examples of my writing my favorite examples of modern writing I think there's a lot of good writing and um but I certainly I think that we're in a golden age of science writing just to give one example and I think we've got you know great writers like Richard Dawkins and Robert Sapolsky and Matt popularizers of mathematics like Steven Strogatz and Jordan elenberg and John Allan Paulus Brian Greene who I quoted doesn't use you know kind of flowery ornate language but the I consider the ability to convey abstruse concepts without dumbing down the content to be a quality of good writing and philosophers who have affiliate themselves with the sciences like Daniel Dennett like Colin McGinn are also I think they're quite effective writers so I don't want to say that's that's the only kind of good writing out there but that's one example where I don't think anyone can complain about the the quality of writing yes your two most recent works the sense of style and better angels yeah it seems that the germs for the idea were based in how many misconceptions hmm and my question is if that's true is that just a coincidence or is that a method you used to find subjects that you find book worthy yeah well oh look were the only in the sense that if it was already believed why do you believe then there wouldn't be a wouldn't be any value in saying something new I don't like the style of journalism of writing of everything you know is wrong that has become kind of gimmick or a hook that that I think as you know well past its it's a used by date so but you know I wanted there to be you know something that is is newsworthy or or of interest another common thread between the better angels of our nature and the sense of style is that both cases I go against the current that says that everything's getting worse whether it be violence in one case or the quality of prose and another I think there is a cognitive illusion that we are prone to that that things are getting worse that comes from a number of sources one of them is as you get older you start to notice certain things they start to bother you more and we have a tendency to externalize that change and assume that it's the world that's getting worse rather than our cells becoming more perceptive also as Thomas Hobbes noted there's a widespread habit among writers and intellectuals to say that things are getting worse because if you say that things are bad now you're implicitly putting down your competitors your rivals because as you put it we compete with the living not with the dead so things used to be better and I'm noticing it it means I'm better than you guys because you are an example of the bad stuff I'm writing about and I think that is a pernicious of pundits and commentators and social critics and maybe there is some annoyance with that kind of one at one-upmanship that motivated me to write these books so to what extent do you think what you sent over here apply to the scientists who's what we English the second language how would it apply to use of English in the second language well a lot of things we just carry over such as being concrete visual being vivid looking looking things up all the more so for English as a second language so I think a lot would carry over yeah I'm sorry I forgot to answer the question do I think that I will move the needle who knows I really yeah I like to think so but it would be presumptuous to predict that I will yes so do you observe a drastic change in the usage of English language with the growing number of international English speakers in terms of slings and accents yeah not really the question is is there has there been a noticeable change in the English language from the fact that basically English has gone global there are many English's there's Indian English and Singapore English and and so on I think you would see that in local media but I don't think that it I don't see a lot of signs of it kind of propagating back to the the mothership to say New York Times or the the Guardian or forums in the English mainstream and in jet which is not to say that there aren't some innovations because languages especially English are always scooping up new terms borrowing from their neighbors and from various specialties and walks of life there are terms that have entered the English mainstream from horse-racing you know but to jockey from sailing take a new tack and it's inevitable that there will be ones both from the world of tech and from other dialects of English just because English has always been collecting and opportunistic but but I don't see much evidence of say common expressions of say Indian English or Singapore English going and swimming upstream and changing American English I mean maybe one or two but it's not a big process as far as I can tell you

Channel: Microsoft Research

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Id: ODzR1mjB99Q

Length: 66min 47sec (4007 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2016