Tonight. Next summer Harvard Universitys himelfarb two, author of trade author of the sense of style, discusses how to improve the quality of our writing. Professor pinker says while texting and the internet are putting for developing bad writing habits, writing well has always been a difficult task. The event was held at barnes noble booksellers in new york city. It is just over an hour. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to barnes noble. I am pleased to welcome tonights guest, professor Steven Pinker from the department of psychology at harvard here to introduce his new book, the sense of style the sense of style on trade the sense of style the thinking persons guide to writing in the 21st century. It has garnered multiple accolades among them he was being named foreignpolicy list of 100 global thinkers in times the hundred most influential people in the world today. Please join me in welcoming Steven Pinker and the sense of style. Thank you. Why is so much writing so back . How can we make it better . And why do we have to decipher so much legalese like the revocation by these regulations of the previously revoked subject to savings does not affect to be continued operations. Why do we have to endure so like it is a moment of nonconstruction, disclosing the application of actuality from the con that imparts you emphasize in the helplessness of the ineffectuality. Whys it so hard to set the time on a digital alarm clock . Well, there is no shortage of areas in the most popular one is captured in this cartoon for the tech writer, good starr, meets more gibberish. In other words, bad writing is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to evade responsibility. Hasty face nerds get their revenge on girls he turned them down for dates in the jocks to kick sand in their faces. Pseudointellectuals try to bamboozle readers for highfalutin gobbledygook on the concealing the fact they have nothing to say. I think theres a problem with this theory, though no doubt it applies to some writers some of the time. But in my experience i know plenty of scholars and scientists to do groundbreaking work on import subjects that have no need to impress and do nothing to hide. Still, theyre writing stinks. Good people can write bad throws. The other popular theory is that Digital Media that are ruining the language. Google is making us stupid. Stupefy us americans and objects are fever. Twitter is making us think and write in 140 years. I think the dumbest generation theory makes a prediction that it was much better before the digital age. Those of you who were around in the 1980s remember what it was like in that decade. That was a decade in which teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs. Bureaucrats wrote in clear prose. Every academic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay. You remember those days, dont you . Or was it the 70s . In the thing is bad throws has burdened us in every era. In 1961, they were saying recent graduates including those that the university agree seems to have no mastery of the language at all. Maybe it was better earlier in the 20th century before the advent of television and radio mike in 1917 when every college in the country close our freshman cant spell, cant punctuate. Its pupils are so ignorant of the nearest rudiments. Maybe go back even further like the 18th century home for a language is degenerating very fast. I begin to fear will be impossible to check it. And then there are the police who said for crying out loud you never end a sentence with a little birdie. [laughter] a better theory is inspired by one of my favorite things by Charles Darwin that man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the battle of our Young Children for no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brutal or write. Speech is instinctive. Writing is and always has been hard to leader is a note invisible, inscrutable. They insist only the writers imagination. The reader cant break in a reactor asked for clarification. So writing is an active pretense and writing is an act of craftsmanship. Well, classic rose gives the reader credit for knowing they are hard to define in many controversies are hard to resolve. Demeter is there there to see what that will do about it. Another corollary is to minimize the reflexive hedging that many scholars engage in. The drizzling of prose with fluffy modifiers like nearly come to seemingly come comparatively, to some extent, so to speak and presumedly, which means they dont really mean what they are saying. Similarly, many academics shudder quotes. I will give you an example of a sentence that does both. This comes from a letter of recommendation i read for michigan graduate school. A quick study has been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her. Are we supposed to understand this is saying this young woman is a quick study . Or she is a quick study, namely someone who is rumored or alleged to be a quick study but really isnt. Virtually any area means there are some areas where she tried to educate herself but failed. The youth of these hedges is so reflects us, so ingrained among many scholars that at one point i met an eminent scientist and i asked her how she was here she pulled out a picture of her 4yearold daughter and she deemed we virtually adore her. Why is there so much compulsive hedging in academia and also other kinds of rational needs . To follow the inheritance that bureaucrats abbreviates cya, cover your anatomy. And there is an alternative. Alternative, tsutsumi. You state what you mean and you count on the ordinary charity of conversation that we all engage in to make conversation possible. So if someone says that they want to move out of seattle because it is a rainy city, you dont interpret them as meaning that every seattle 24 hours a day seven days a week, 52 weeks the year. Automatically you interpret it as relatively or somewhat rainy. So you can count on not in writing classic prose. A second major implication is that has to keep that the illusion that the reader is seeing the world while theyre listening to verbiage. That illusion can be shattered when a writer writes in cliches, leading to the familiar advice, avoid cliches like the plague. So the kind of writer who writes we needed to get the ball rolling in our search for the holy grail fabulous and very magical door slam dunk, so he wrote the punches and let the chips fall where they may well seem the glass is half full, which is easier said than done. As you process this prose, you clearly have to turn off your visual cortex aroused to get one ludicrous after another, especially since the overuse of cliches will inevitably lead writers to mix their metaphors as in another sentence from the letter of recommendation i received the renaissance man drilling down to the core issues and pushing the envelope. Not sure how you can do all three of those at the same time. When no one has yet invented a. [laughter] related hazard writing in cliches or at least not thinking of the visual content of what you write is that youd be eligible for membership in american to figuratively used literally. There is nothing wrong with saying she literally blushed. It is not good to say she literally exploded in very, very bad to say she literally emasculated. [laughter] a third is about the world. Not about the conceptual tools with which we understand the world. Therefore calls for minimizing the use of concepts. Concepts about other concepts in framework issue model, roll strategy, tendency and anyone who has read your project or academic prose is all too familiar with these filler words. Or example, from an editorial New York Times legal scholar who wrote i had the restart to amend constitution would work on an actual level. On the aspirational level however, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable, which means i doubt theyre trying to amend the constitution would actually succeed him up it may be to aspire to it. Or it is important to approach the subject of a variety of strategies including the Mental Health assistance but also from a Law Enforcement perspective to which we need to consult psychiatrists, but we may also have to inform the police. Classic prose narrates ongoing event. We see agents performing actions that affect objects. Nonclassic prose signifies events and then refers to them, using a pernicious grammatical process called nominal efficient, churning something into a noun or a name. So instead of talking about someone appearing, you see they make an appearance. Instead of organizing something can be bring about the organization of that scene. In the english scholar called the zombie nouns because they leapt across the stage without any conscious agent direct in their motion. They can turn prose into a night of the living dead. Examples. From an experimental paper, participants read assertions because veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word, which means people i sentence on the screen followed by the word true or false. [laughter] subjects are tested under good to excellent acoustic isolation to which we tested the students in a quiet room. [laughter] these semantic concepts in zombie nouns has become such a signature that everyone can recognize the humor behind this editorial cartoon from tom tolls, graybearded academician with the global s. A. T. Scores are at an alltime low. Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatic designated to maximize awareness and utilization of communication skills with the standardize review and assessment of one null development. Any interrogatory verbalizations . It is not just academics who are captive by zombie nouns. Its also politicians as when governor rick perry at texas said right now there is not an anticipation that there will be a cancellation. That is right and we dont anticipate that we will have to kill you. And corporate consultant as in the man who explained what he did for a living by saying im a discipline social media strategisstrategis t. I kubler programs, products and strategies to corporate clients across a spectrum of two medications unction and the journalists pressed to explain what that means coming he finally confessed i teach the companies. Product engineers used to be that if you would ride a Consumer Product like a portable generator, mild exposure over time from extreme exposure may rapidly be fatal without reducing significant warning symptoms. Well, turns out hundreds of people succeeded themselves every year by using portable generators indoors. So they change the sticker to read using a generator indoors can kill you in minutes. That is classic style and what it means is nonclassic style can lead really be a matter of life and death. Yet literally be a matter of life and death. I promise that a better understanding of the design of language can lead to sounder writing it dies. How might that work . Lets take another contributor to zombie prose, the passive voice, the difference between the dog and demand, the active voice in the man whose bitten by the dog in the passive voice. It is wellknown that the passive is overused by academics. On the basis of the analysis made of the data which recollect david is a suggestion that null hypothesis can be rejected. And lawyers of the outstanding balances repaid in full, the unearned finance charge will be refunded to the passage in a row and political officials may all recognize the recently resigned director of the secret service, Julia Pierson who in trying to explain how it is that on her watch an armed intruder with the sense to the white house sprinted across the lawn, manage to get into the white house armed with a knife before he was finally tackled while she said the stakes were made. What members called the evasive passes. Accordingly, all the classic style guides advise against using the voice. Use the active voice. The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive. Many sentences can be made lightly and emphatic by substituting the active voice for some expression on his there is or could be heard. If you notice something about this advice, it uses the passive voice to tell people not to use the passive voice. Similarly, the other iconic hottie of advice for writing handed out to every College Freshman is George Orwells politics and the english language in which he says a mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is most marked characteristic of modern english prose. I list are expanding to which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged. Wherever possibly used in preference to the act is, which contains not one, but two examples of the passive voice. The passive voice and for that matter, any english construction could not have survived in the language for 1500 years unless it was doing something useful. Indeed as these two bits of selfcontradictory advice remind us, we really cant do without it. Why is that . To understand it, you have to think about the design of language, how language works. And in that shell, language can be thought of as an african web of knowledge into a string of words. The writers knowledge is what cognitive psychologists model is a semantic network. You can think of it as a mind wide web. This is a simplified portion of the persons knowledge of the tragedy of edifice rex has brought to life by police. It has a number of com to send images and melody, all interconnect did by bosco relations. Your mind can flip from concept to come to in pretty much the order. When it comes time to share a chunk of this network with another person, youve got to converted into a sentence. What is a sentence . It is a linear string of words. At his face married his mother and killed his father. One word after another. This means there is an inherent problem in the design of language. The order of words in a sentence has to do two things at once. On one hand it serves as the meaning that indicates who did what to whom. At the same time, it necessarily present some information to the reader before others and does the fact that the information is absorbed into the mind of the reader. The early material in the sentences the sentence topic that refers to what the leader is looking at. Its the giving information because it gives back to what the reader is already thinking about. The later material in a sentence presents the new imation. It is analogous to what you notice once you are looking at a particular direction. Any prose that violates these principles will have a feeling of being choppy or disjointed or incoherent. Enter the passive voice. The passive is a work around for this flaw or defined contradiction and language. It allows writers to contain the same semantic information, namely who did what to whom. But while flipping the surface order in particular it allows the writer to start the sentence and that is why it is bad advice. It is actually the better construction when the dads who is currently the focus of the readers mental. I will go with an example. I am going to give you a passage from the wikipedia entry for edifice rex, which describes the epiphany that begins the climax of the play. Spoiler alert. A messenger arrives. Formally a shepherd on mount kiper ratted during that time was given a baby. The baby was given to him by another shepherd from the household wouldve been told to get rid of the child. They notice that its pretty understandable passage has three constructions in a row. First i is there on the messenger. The first sentence as a messenger arrives. So the messenger is the subject of the sentence. He was given a baby. And our eyes are on the baby and so the next sentence uses a sentence uses the password the baby is the subject. The baby was given to the messenger by another shepherd. Now our eyes are on the other shepherd and so he is the subject of the sentence. The other shepherd had been told to get rid of the child. That is why this passage is reasonably easytofollow. Imagine the writer had followed the advice, cumbre passes to act. A messenger arrives and emerges that he is firmly shepherd on mount kiper ron and during that time someone gave him a baby. Another household and someone had told to get rid of the child gave the baby to have. This is much harder to follow because you feel like you are at a tennis match looking back and forth at the different participants. A wellcrafted passages like the careful choice of camera angles by a cinematographer and the passive is one of the means by which that can be accomplished. It provides writers with constructions that varies the order of the string of words while preserving the meaning, you could write at this giveaway is, latest discovery at a phase ended with additives who killed leahs and so on. And the challenge for writers is to choose the construction that introduces ideas to the reader in the order in which you can rest absorbed them. This does bring up the question of why the passage is so common in bad writing, which it indeed is. The reason is good writers narrate a story, which is advanced by protagonists who make things happen. Bad writers work backward from their own knowledge, just writing down ideas in the order in which they occur. The writer knows how the story turned out, so the writer begins with the outcome of events in prison that causes an afterthought in the passive voice makes that all too easy. Bad habit of writers leads to the third part of his talk on enabling why is it so hard for writers to use language to come a ideas. The best explanation that i know of is a phenomenon in the college called the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge works as follows. When you know something, it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine what late for someone else not to know it. Also called mind blowing a scummy egocentrism, hindsight bias in half a dozen other phenomenon. A classic experimental illustration is a study done on three year old children to any developmental psychologys events. A 3yearold comes into the lab. You give them a box of m ms. He opens the box and is surprised to find britains type. See that the ribbons back in the box, close to death. Now a new child comes to the lab and you asked the boy, what does jason think is in the box . The child will say rude bins, even though jason has no way of knowing the box contains ribbons. And he cant help but think everyone else knows it too. What did you think was in the box when you came into the lab . The child will save ribbons. Are now adults course outgrow this kind of error, kind of. It has many studies have shown that adults are prone to a version of the same impairment if a person knows the meaning of an obscure word, they assume everyone else knows it. If they know a fact, they assume other people know it. If they know how to use a cell phone that they can learn quickly as well. The chief contributor to opaque writing. They spell out the abbreviations to find the technical terms what the jargon to use concrete language that allows the reader to imagine something those two abstractions meaningless to the reader. And as you become and develop expert