Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century - with Steven Pinker

Why is it so bad to write so much? Why do we have to struggle with so much legal jargon? As in "The revocation by this Regulation of a previously revoked provision subject to savings does not affect the continuation of operations." Why do we put up with academics? As in "It is the moment of non-construction, which reveals the concept's lack of actuality in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the impotence of its fall into conceptuality." Why is it so difficult to set the time on a digital alarm clock? There is no shortage of theories; and the one I hear most often is captured in this cartoon, in which a boss tells a tech writer, "Good start.

You need more gibberish." That is to say,

writing

poorly is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to evade their responsibility. The pale-faced nerds get revenge on the girls who rejected them for dates in high school; and the athletes who kicked sand in their faces. Pseudo-intellectuals try to fool their audiences with pretentious talk, disguising the fact that they have nothing to say. Well, I have no doubt that the deception theory is true for some writers on some occasions; but as a general explanation, it does not seem true. I know many scientists doing innovative work on important topics.

They have nothing to hide and no need to impress, but their

writing

still sucks. Good people can write bad prose. The second most popular theory is that digital media is ruining the language. Google is making us stupid. The digital age stupefies young Americans and endangers our future. Twitter forces us to think in 140 characters. Well, if the Dumbest Generation theory were true, then that implies that it must have been much better before the advent of digital media, like in the 1980s. Many of you will remember that that was a time when the teenagers spoke in articulate paragraphs.

Remember when bureaucrats wrote in simple English and each academic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay? Or was it the 70s? The fact is that in all eras one can find complaints about the imminent decline of the language, as in 1961, when a commentator complained that "new graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no command of the language." language". "Well, then we can go back to before the advent of radio and television. In 1917, one commentator wrote: "From every university in the country is the cry: 'Our freshmen can't spell or punctuate.'" "All secondary schools are in poor condition because their students ignore even the smallest rudiments." Well, perhaps we have to go back even earlier, say, to the glory days of the European Enlightenment, like 1785, in which one commentator said: "our language is degenerating very rapidly...

I begin to fear that it will be impossible to prove it. " And then there's the old grammar police that said, "Oh my God... you never finish a sentence with a little bird." I think a better theory comes from Charles Darwin, who wrote, "Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babbling of our little children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write." That is, while speaking is instinctive, writing is and always has been difficult. Your readers are unknown, invisible, inscrutable. They only exist in your imagination when you put pencil to paper.

They cannot react or intervene or ask for clarification. As a result, writing is an act of simulation and writing is an act of craft. Well, what can we do then to improve the craft of writing? For many decades, this question had, at least in the United States, a single answer: give students this, the iconic "The Elements of Style" by Cornell professor William Strunk, Jr. and his student, EB White. who later rose to fame as a New Yorker essayist and author of the children's classics Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. Note, by the way, that both men were born before the turn of the

century

.

That is, before the turn of the

century

. Now, there is, without a doubt, a lot of common sense in The Elements of Style. There are little tips like "Use defined, specific and concrete language." "Write with nouns and verbs." "Put the emphatic words last." And my favorite prime directive is “Omit unnecessary words.” —which is, by the way, an excellent example of itself. On the other hand, there are many reasons why The Elements of Style and other traditional

style

manuals such as Fowler's Modern English Usage, probably the closest English equivalent, cannot be the basis for writing advice in the

21st

century.

For one thing, a lot of the advice is outdated. Language changes. For example, Strunk and White stated that "end is a pompous and ambiguous verb." Now, many of you will be surprised to discover that this useful and perfectly blameless word would be considered pompous and ambiguous at the time. But it turns out that it was something new in Professor Strunk's era. He squeaked in her ears. He declared it pompous, but then it fell into common usage and no one even remembers that it was ever considered ungrammatical. Or, "Reaching out is lazy and presumptuous. Don't contact people; contact them, look them up, call them, meet them, or meet them." Of course, Strunk and White did not live to see the day when they could also be sent text messages, instant messages, tweets, emails, etc.

They also didn't really appreciate that "contact" is actually an indispensable verb, because there are times when it doesn't matter if a person calls, meets, or texts another person, as long as they contact them by a medium. or another. And for this, "contact" is a perfectly useful verb. Some of the advice is baffling, like this: "the word people should not be used with number words, instead of people." That is, you should not say 'six people'. Why not? Well, "if five of 'six people' left, how many people would be left? Answer: one person." Did you understand it? Following the same logic, you should never say: I have two children or 32 teeth. or two feet or any other irregular plural.

Or how is this? Note that the word smart means one thing when applied to people and another when applied to horses. A smart horse is a kind horse, not a clever one. The problem with traditional

style

advice is that it consists of an arbitrary list of dos and don'ts based on the authors' likes and dislikes. It is not based on a principled understanding of how language works. And as a result, users have no way to understand and assimilate the advice. And as I've pointed out, a lot of the advice is simply wrong. I think we can do better today.

We can base writing advice on language science and scholarship, on modern grammatical theory, which is an advance over ancient grammars carried over from Latin, on evidence-based dictionaries, on cognitive science research on which makes prayers easier. or difficult to read, and on historical and critical studies of use. It all starts with an effective prose communication model. As I have been emphasizing, writing is an unnatural act and good style must begin with a coherent mental model of the communication scenario: how the writer imagines the reader and what he is trying to achieve. And my favorite model of this type comes from a beautiful book by the English scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, and they call it classical style.

The model behind the classical style is that prose is a window to the world. The writer has seen something in the world that the reader has not yet noticed. He positions the reader so that he can see it with his own eyes. The writer and the reader are equal. The goal is to help the reader see objective reality and the style is conversation. Now, that may seem obvious, but the classical style is just one of a variety of explaining styles, including the contemplative style, the oracular style, and the practical style. But what they say infects most academic prose is what they call the postmodern or self-conscious style, in which the writer's primary, though unspoken, concern is to avoid being condemned for philosophical naivete about his own enterprise.

They continued. "When we open a cookbook, we completely leave aside and hope that the author leaves aside the kind of question that goes to the heart of certain philosophical traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is it the food something about which Is knowledge possible? Can anyone ever tell us anything true about cooking? Similarly, the classical style leaves out philosophical questions about its enterprise. topic, and its purpose is exclusively to address its topic." Well, I would be defying the principles of classical prose if I just talked about it without showing you an example.

And here you have an example. This is an article by physicist Brian Greene on the theory of inflationary cosmology and one of its implications, multiple universes. And he wrote it for Newsweek magazine. Greene writes: "If space is expanding now, then in earlier times the universe must have been getting smaller. At some point in the distant past, everything we see now, the ingredients responsible for every planet, every star, every galaxy, even Space itself must have been compressed into an infinitesimal speck that then swelled outward, evolving into the universe as we know it. However, scientists were aware that the Big Bang theory suffered from a problem. significant flaw... of all things the explosion leaves out Einstein's equations do a wonderful job of describing how the universe evolved a fraction of a second after the explosion, but the equations break down, similar to the error message it returns. a calculator when you try to divide 1 by .0, when applied to the extreme environment of the universe's earliest moment, the Big Bang provides no insight into what might have driven the explosion itself." Now, in these few sentences, Greene has covered some pretty sophisticated cosmology and physics.

But he does it in a way that anyone can see for themselves. That is, if you can imagine the universe expanding, you can run that mental movie backwards and imagine that it must have originated from an infinitesimal speck. And even the abstruse mathematical notion of the decomposition of equations is presented in a way that anyone can see for themselves. He can take out a calculator and try it: try dividing 1 by 0 and you will indeed get an error message, or he can try to understand what it might mean to divide the number 1 into 0 parts. And that is the classic style.

The reader can see for himself. Now, I think many examples of written advice are implications of the model behind classical prose. To begin with, classical prose focuses on the thing being shown, not on the activity of studying it. Here's an example of the type of prose I have to read during my work day. A typical article in my field might begin like this: In recent years, an increasing number of researchers have focused their attention on the problem of children's language acquisition. In this article, recent theories about this process will be reviewed. Well, no offense, but not many people are that interested in how teachers spend their time.

A more classic introduction to the same topic might have been: All children acquire the ability to speak and understand a language without explicit lessons. How do they achieve this feat? A corollary of this warning is to minimize the kind of apologies that academics in particular feel compelled to make. Again, this is the kind of sentence I have to deal with in my daily life. 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 is much uncertainty about the interpretation of experimental data and great controversy surrounding theories.

More research is needed. Now this is the kind of verbiage that could be eliminated at a stroke without loss of content, because classical prose gives the reader credit for knowing that many concepts are difficult to define and many controversies difficult to resolve. The reader is there to see what the writer will do about it. Another corollary is to minimize the coverage that is apparently mandatory in academic prose. The dispersion of words in prose is somewhat, quite, rather, almost, relatively, apparently, partly, comparatively, predominantly, apparently, so to speak, and presumably. And the similar use of shutter quotes, by which a writer distances himself from a familiar figure of speech.

Here is an example of a recommendation letter I received. "He studies quickly and has been able to educate himself in practically any area that interests him." Well, should we take this recommendation as saying that the young woman in question is a fast learner or that she is a fast learner, i.e.someone who is only rumored or supposed to be a fast student but who in reality is not? And if he has been able to educate himself in virtually any area that interests him, are there some areas of interest that he tried to educate himself in but failed?

I became aware of this habit when I ran into an acquaintance at an academic conference. We hadn't seen each other in several years and I asked him how he was doing. And when he pulled out a photo of her four-year-old daughter and said, we practically adore her. Oh. Why compulsory coverage? Well, in many bureaucracies it is imperative that bureaucrats abbreviate themselves as CYA - to cover their anatomy. But there is an alternative in the classic style... so sue me. That is, it is better to be clear and possibly wrong than confusing and, as physicists say, not even wrong.

Classical prose also has the cooperative character of ordinary conversation. The fact that two people in a conversation read between the lines and connect the dots so that everything does not have to be said with absolute precision. So if I said, well, in recent years Americans have been getting fatter, I would interpret that to mean average or overall. You're not going to force me to claim that every one of the 350 million citizens of the United States has been gaining weight. I call these tendencies professional narcissism, the confusion of the activities of your trade or field or profession with the subject matter it is designed to address.

And it is not just an academic problem, but it infects many professions. The media, for example, will often cover coverage, giving rise to the notorious media echo chamber. Much of the coverage of movies and popular music will tell you all about the first weekend gross and number of weeks on the charts, but it won't tell you anything about the actual work of art. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has been bored to death by the museum display of a sherd in the glass case and a long explanation of how it fits into a classification of pottery styles.

But it doesn't say anything about the people who made it or what they did with it. And many government and business websites will give you instructions on bureaucratic organization, but they don't have an easy way to find the information you really need. A second characteristic of classical prose is that it maintains the illusion that the reader is seeing a world rather than just hearing gibberish. And as such, avoid clichés like the plague. We're all familiar with the type of writer who utters phrases like the ones we needed to think outside the box in our quest for the holy grail, but we discovered that it was neither a panacea nor a sure-fire solution.

So we roll with the punches and let the chips fall where they may while we see the glass half full. It's a no-brainer. Now, the problem with writing clichés is that it forces the reader to shut down their visual brain and just process the words as blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or if you really think about the prose down to the underlying image, it will inevitably be disrupted by the inevitable mixed metaphors. Here's another quote from a letter of recommendation I received. "Jeff is a Renaissance man, delving into the core themes and going beyond them." It's not clear how you can do all that at the same time.

Or this is from a New York Times article. "No one has yet invented a condom that surprises people." And if he writes this way, he will be eligible for membership in AWFUL, i.e. Americans using literally figuratively. And they told me that there is a British chapter. Now, it's perfectly acceptable to say that she literally blushed. It's much more problematic to say that she literally exploded. And it's very, very bad to say that she literally castrated him. Now, thirdly, classical prose is about the world. It is not about the conceptual tools with which we understand the world.

And as such, avoid the excessive use of metaconcepts, that is, concepts about other concepts, such as approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, paradigm, perspective, process, rule, strategy, tendency, variable. Admit it, you use these words a lot when you write. That is, this is a phrase taken from an editorial by a jurist. "I seriously doubt that trying to amend the Constitution will work on a real level. However, at the aspirational level, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable, that is, I doubt that trying to amend the Constitution will actually succeed, but It can be valuable to aspire to it." Or this from an email I received. "It is important to address the issue from a variety of strategies, including mental health care, but also from a law enforcement perspective." Translation: We should consult a psychiatrist about this man, but we may also have to inform the police.

Classical prose narrates ongoing events. We see agents performing actions that affect objects. Non-classical prose reifies events and then refers to them with a single word using a dangerous tool of English grammar called nominalization, turning a verb or adjective into a noun. So instead of showing up, you make an appearance. Instead of organizing something, you cause the organization of that thing. Helen Sword, a language scholar, calls them zombie nouns, because they lumber across the page without any conscious agent directing the action. And they can turn prose into a Night of the Living Dead. Participants read statements whose truth was affirmed or denied by subsequent presentation of an evaluation word, which is another way of saying that people saw sentences, each followed by the word true or false.

Subjects were tested under good to excellent sound insulation conditions, that is, we tested students in a quiet room. But again, it's not just academics who have this bad habit. They are also politicians. When a hurricane threatened the Republican National Convention a few years ago, Florida Governor Rick Scott said, "no cancellations are anticipated at this time." That is, right now we do not foresee that we will have to cancel it. And just not to be partisan, on the other side of the American political spectrum, here we have Secretary of State John Kerry saying "the president wants to try to see how we can do our best to find a way to facilitate." "In other words, the president wants to help.

And corporate consultants. A young man interviewed by a journalist explained that he is a digital and social media strategist. "I offer programs, products and strategies to our corporate clients across the spectrum of communication functions" And when the journalist confessed that he had no idea what that meant and asked him what he really did, he finally broke down and said, "I teach big companies how to use Facebook and product engineers." combustion heaters used to carry a warning something like this: "mild exposure to CO can cause cumulative damage over time. Extreme exposure to CO can be quickly fatal without producing significant warning symptoms." Yeah, yeah.

Whatever. And as a result, several hundred Americans each year turn their homes into gas chambers and suffocate themselves and their loved ones. families running heaters and generators indoors, until they replaced the warning with this: "running a generator indoors can kill you in minutes." So classic prose can literally be a matter of life and death. Yes, literally. So the second part. How can an understanding of output design lead to better writing advice? Another contributor to zombie prose is the passive voice. This refers to the contrast between a sentence in the active voice, like the dog bit the man, and a sentence like the man was bitten by the dog, in the passive voice.

It is well known that the passive voice is abused by academics, since, based on the analysis of the data collected, it is suggested that the null hypothesis can be rejected. For passives in a sentence. And lawyers. If the outstanding balance is paid in full in advance, the unearned finance charge will be refunded. Three liabilities. But perhaps most infamous of all are the politicians. Here we have one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States, the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who, explaining how his administration caused a three-hour traffic jam by deliberately closing the lanes of a tunnel during rush hour to punish El mayor of a town that would not support his re-election, he said, "mistakes were made." The passive evasion of the infamous politician.

Not in vain, all traditional manuals warn against the use of the passive voice. Strunk and White say, "use the active voice. The active voice is usually more direct and forceful than the passive. Many tame sentences can be made lively and emphatic by substituting some surface expression such as that for a transitive in the active voice." or it might be overheard." Well, I'm glad to hear from the laughter that several people have noted that, yes, Strunk and White used the passive to tell people not to use it. The other iconic piece of writing advice is the classic essay The George Orwell's politics and the English language, probably the second most widely distributed writing advice.

And Orwell also says that "a mixture of vagueness and utter incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose," he wrote in 1949, showing that some things do not change. "Below I list several of the tricks by which the work of prose construction is usually avoided. Whenever possible the passive voice is used in preference to the active." A passage that has not one but two uses of the passive voice to tell people not to use the passive voice. Well, the passive construction could not have survived in the English language for 1,500 years if it served no purpose.

Why can't we do without it even when we tell people not to overuse it? It all comes down to language design. an application to convert a network of thoughts into a string of words. Now, the writer's knowledge can be considered as a kind of mental network that cognitive psychologists call a semantic network. That is, a collection of nodes for concepts. fragment of a person's knowledge of the tragic events that Sophocles brought to life in his play Oedipus Rex. So you have several nodes for concepts like father, kill, marry. You have a lot of links that indicate how the concepts are related. maker, made to, about, is, and so on.

Now, when you simply sit back and reflect on your knowledge base, your mind can navigate from one concept to another in virtually any order. But what happens when you have to translate your network of ideas into a sentence? Well, now you have to turn that tangled web into a linear chain of words. In Sophocles' play, Oedipus marries his mother and kills his father. That means there is an inherent problem with the language design. The order of words in a sentence has to do two things at once. It is the code that uses English syntax to express who did what and to whom.

At the same time, it necessarily presents some chunks of information to the reader before others and therefore affects how the information will be absorbed. In particular, the beginning material of the sentence refers to the topic of the sentence and naturally connects to what already resonates in the reader's mind. In classical prose metaphor, it refers to the general direction in which the reader is looking. The last words of the sentence contain the focal point of the sentence, the fact it now conveys. In the metaphor, it is what the reader is supposed to notice now. Any prose that violates these principles, even if every sentence is clear, will feel choppy, disjointed, or incoherent.

And that brings us to the passive. The passive is an English workaround for this inherent design limitation of the language. It allows writers to convey the same ideas, that is, who did what and to whom, by varying the order of the words. In particular, it allows the writer to begin the sentence with the done or acted rather than the doer or actor. And that is why avoiding the passive as a general law is bad advice. The passive is, in fact, the best construction when what is done or acted upon is currently the objective of the reader's mental gaze.

Again I will give you an example. This comes from the Wikipedia entry on Oedipus Rex and describes the pivotal moment in the play when the gruesome backstory is revealed to the audience. Spoiler alert. "A messenger arrives from Corinth. It turns out that he was formerly a shepherd on Mount Kithaeron, and during that time he was given a baby. The baby, he said, was given to him by another shepherd from the house of Laius, who had been told to get rid of of the child". Now notice that this passage has three passive sentences in a row, and for good reason.

As the passage opens, our eyes are on the messenger: a messenger arrives from Corinth, so the next sentence that tells us something about the messenger must begin with a reference to the messenger, and thanks to the passive voice, so he does it. . He, the messenger, was given a baby. Well now we're looking at the baby figuratively, at least our mindIt is, and the next sentence should start with the baby. And again, thanks to her passive voice, she succeeds. Another shepherd handed the baby to the messenger. Well, now we are looking at this new pastor and the next sentence that tells us something about him should begin with that.

And again, the passive makes it possible. The other pastor had been told to get rid of the boy. Now imagine if the writer of this passage had literally followed the advice of the traditional manuals or had fallen victim to the type of corrector that turns every passive sentence into an active one, then you would have a messenger arriving from Corinth. It turns out that he was previously a shepherd on Mount Kithaeron, and during that time someone gave him a baby. Another shepherd from the house of Laius, he says, who had been told by someone to get rid of a child, handed it over to him.

Now, I think he will agree that this is not an improvement. Your attention shifts from one part of the story to another. And the participants parachute in without warning or a proper introduction. More generally, English syntax provides writers with constructions that vary the order of 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 presents ideas to the reader in the order in which he or she can absorb them. Well, why then is the passive voice so common in bad writing, as it surely is?

It's because good writers tell a story, advanced by protagonists who make things happen. Bad writers work backwards from their own knowledge, writing ideas in the order in which they occur to them. They start with the outcome of the event, because they know how it happened. And then they add the cause as an afterthought, and the passive makes it all too easy. So why should it be so difficult? Why is it so difficult for writers to use the resources that the English language offers to convey ideas effectively? The best explanation I know is conveyed by this cartoon, and it is called the curse of knowledge.

The fact that when you know something, it's hard to imagine what it's like for someone else to not know it. Psychologists give it various names. It is also called mind blindness, egocentrism, hindsight bias, and about half a dozen others. Perhaps the best introduction comes from a classic experiment that will be familiar to any of you taking a child psychology course, the M&M study or, in Britain, you can call it the Smarties Study. A three-year-old boy enters a laboratory and sits at a table. The experimenter gives him a box of Smarties. He's all excited. He opens it and discovers that instead of containing Smarties, the box contains pencils.

Then the boy is surprised. And the experimenter puts the pencils back in the box, closes it and puts it back on the table. And he says, okay. Well, now another kid is coming in, Jason. What does Jason think is in the box? And the child will say pencils. Although, of course, Jason has no way of knowing that the box contains pencils, the boy knows, but a newcomer does not. And in fact, if you ask him, well, when you walked into the room, what did you think was in the box? And he will say pencils. Now that he knows it, he can no longer regain the state of innocence in which he once did not know it.

Now adults, of course, overcome this limitation (more or less a little) because many studies have shown a similar effect in adults. People will tend to attribute their own obscure vocabulary to the general population. If they know, they assume everyone else knows. And in one study, the more practice someone had using a complicated device like a smartphone, the less time they estimated it would take someone else to learn it, because the more familiar they were, obviously the easier it must be, because it was easy for them. . I think the curse of knowledge is the main contributing factor to opaque writing.

It simply does not occur to the writer that readers have not learned the jargon from him, that they do not know the intermediate steps that seem too obvious to mention, that they cannot visualize a scene that is currently in the writer's mind. And that's why the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon, explain the logic or provide concrete details, even when he writes for professional colleagues. It's a lazy excuse writers often have that they don't have to explain things because, after all, they're just writing for their professional peers. But because of the curse of knowledge, even prose written for professional peers is often surprisingly opaque.

I will give you an example. This is an excerpt from an article about consciousness written in a journal called Trends In Cognitive Science, which is designed to present brief, readable summaries of research for the benefit of cognitive scientists who keep up with the work of others. So here's a passage. "The slow, integrative nature of conscious perception is confirmed behaviorally by observations such as the "rabbit illusion" and its variants, or the way a stimulus is ultimately perceived is influenced by post-stimulus events that arise several hundred milliseconds later. of the original. stimulus." I've been in this business for almost 40 years and I have no idea what they're talking about.

I have never heard of the rabbit illusion, although I know many illusions. And I know what the word stimulus means, but I have no idea what they're talking about when they talk about how a stimulus is ultimately perceived. So I went to my bookshelves and found one that had an entry for something called a skin rabbit illusion, which works like this: the subject closes their eyes and extends their arm. The experimenter hits him three times on the wrist, three times on the elbow, and three times on the shoulder. And the person experiences it as a series of taps that run along the entire arm, like a rabbit jumping, hence the rabbit illusion.

Well, why didn't they say that? Not only is it no less scientific to explain the specific scenario, but it is actually more scientific because knowing that this is the rabbit's illusion, I can follow the logic of what they claim, that is, what they supposedly show us is consciousness. Do not track sensory events in real time. But our brain constantly edits our experience after the fact to make it feel more coherent. Well, knowing what the illusion really consists of, I can then reflect on whether that really follows, whether it is a correct interpretation of the illusion, or whether it might have some alternative explanation, something I can't do with stimulus and post-stimulus. that.

I think the best way to capture the temptations of thoughtless abbreviations is with an old joke. Then a man walks into a Catskills resort in upstate New York, walks into the dining room, and sees a group of retired Borscht Belt comedians sitting around a table. And then there is an empty chair. He joins them. And he hears one of the comedians say 47, and the others burst into laughter. Another says 112, and then everyone bursts out laughing, rolling on the floor. And he can't understand what's going on. Then he asked the boy who was next to him. He says, what is happening?

And the guy says, well, you know, these veterans have been together for so long that they all thought the same jokes. So to save time, they have put a number on each joke and now they just have to say the number. The guy says, that's clever. I'll try. That says 31. Dead silence. He says 77. Everyone stares at him. Nobody laughs. Then he sinks back into his seat and says to his friend, what happened? Why didn't anyone laugh? The guy says, well, it's all in the way you tell it. So how is the curse of knowledge exercised? Well, the traditional solution is to always keep the reader over your shoulder in mind.

That is, empathize with your reader, see the world from his point of view, try to feel his pain, walk a mile in his moccasins, etc. Well, this is good advice as far as it goes, but it only goes so far, because a lot of research in psychology has shown that we're not very good at figuring out what people know, even when we try really hard. . A better solution is to show a draft to a real representative reader, and you will often find that what is obvious to you is not obvious to anyone else. You can even show a draft to yourself after some time has passed and it's no longer familiar.

And if you're like me, you'll find yourself thinking that wasn't clear or what I meant by that, or very often, who wrote this garbage? And then rewrite, ideally several times, with the sole goal of making the prose understandable to the reader. Finally, how should we think about the correct use of what is right or wrong, right or wrong? Which is the aspect of writing that by far draws the most attention and awakens the most emotion. Now, some uses are clearly incorrect. There is a famous and beloved American children's character known as Cookie Monster, of Muppet and Sesame Street fame, whose signature catchphrase is "I want cookie." Now, even three-year-olds appreciate and can laugh at Cookie Monster, because even by their own lights, they know that Cookie Monster has made a grammatical mistake.

Many of you may be familiar with the form of humor or so-called humor called lolcat, as in I can has cheezburger, the humor of which is that this cat is incompetent at English grammar. If we didn't recognize that the cat was making a grammatical error, he wouldn't be funny to us, at least to those people who do find him funny. Are our children learning? Even former President George W. Bush acknowledged that this was a grammatical error in a self-deprecating speech in which he pointed out many of his own past speech errors. But others are not so clear, simply to not be partisan, Democratic President Bill Clinton, when he ran for office in 1992, had as one of his campaign slogans "give Al Gore and me the opportunity to bring back to the United States," the nation's terrible English teachers who pointed out that this is an example of the notorious mistake between you and me.

And it should be "give Al Gore and me a chance to bring America back." Another Democratic president, Barack Obama, said no American should live under a cloud of suspicion just because of his appearance. The infamous singular "they" error. Captain Kirk from Star Trek, the Starship Enterprise's five-year mission, "to boldly go where no man has gone before." Split infinitive. The Beatles, "You think you lost your love. Well, I saw her yesterday. She's thinking about you and she told me what to say." Someone? Sentence with a preposition at the end. Preposition at the end of a sentence. And then I doubt many people recognize this American icon.

This is Dick Cavett, who was the host of our short-lived and much-missed smart, witty, urbane talk show. And in an op-ed in which he discussed a college reunion, he wrote, "Upon checking into the hotel, it was nice to see some of my old classmates in the lobby." Someone? Did anyone go to school before the 1960s? Yes. It is a hanging participle. Well, what do we do with these most controversial usage errors? They have given rise to what journalists sometimes call the language war. On the one hand, there are prescriptivists who prescribe how people should speak and write.

They are also known as purists, rigorists, pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots, nitpickers, traditionalists, language police, usage nannies, grammar Nazis and the gotcha gang, according to whom the rules of usage are objectively correct. Obeying them is maintaining standards of excellence. To despise them is to brutalize literate culture, degrade language, and accelerate the decline of civilization. Now, according to the scenario, on the other hand, we have the descriptivists, who describe how people speak and write, according to whom the rules of usage are just the secret handshake of the ruling class, and people should be freed to write. whatever. Now, I think there are reasons to believe that the language war, however dear it may be to certain magazines, is a pseudo-controversy.

If it were really true, then prescriptivists would have to insist that the lyrics of the famous Beatles song should read "it's you she's thinking about." And descriptivists would have to claim that there is nothing wrong with the fact that I can eat a cheeseburger, in which case they would not be able to understand the lolcat joke. I think we need a more sophisticated way of thinking about usage. What then are the rules of use? Where do they come from? They are certainly not logical truths that you can prove in propositional calculus, nor are they officially regulated by dictionaries.

And I can speak with some authority here, because I'm the chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and when I joined the panel, I asked the editor in chief, so how do you guys decide what to put in the dictionary? ? And his response was, "we pay attention to the way people use words." That is, when it comes to correction, there is no one in charge. The madmen run the asylum. So, one way to make sense of usage rules is for them to be conventions.tacit and evolving. A convention is a way of doing things that has no particular advantage other than the fact that everyone else does it.

Paper money is an example. A piece of paper with a picture of the queen has no inherent value other than the fact that everyone expects others to treat it as if it had value. There is no particular reason to drive on the right instead of driving on the left. There is nothing sinister about driving on the left, no matter how clumsy or socialist. But there's an excellent reason to drive on the left on this side of the Atlantic: that's what everyone else does. However, unlike traffic rules or laws authorizing the use of currency, the rules of language are tacit.

They arise as a rough consensus within a community of careful writers without explicit deliberation, agreement, or legislation. And conventions evolve, as I mentioned in the case of "end and contact", they change organically 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. So let's take our children's learning, which not only George W. Bush but also Microsoft Word's grammar checker points out as an error with the famous squiggly green line. "Are our children learning?" is equivalent to "our children are learning." Everyone can see that "our children are learning" is ungrammatical, and therefore "our children are learning" is also ungrammatical.

Or, in a slightly more complicated case, the impact of the cuts has not yet been felt. Why did Microsoft Word put a squiggly line under that? Well, if you think about it, that phrase is "the impact has not been felt." If you remove the optional "of the cuts," that just jumps off the page as ungrammatical. Of course, "their impact has not been felt," so "the impact of the cuts has not been felt." The writer was simply distracted by the plural cuts that coincided with the verb have. In addition, there are some word choice rules that establish important semantic distinctions.

Fulsome is not a fancy synonym for complete. abundant meansexcessive or insincere. And so one should not thank someone for over-praising him, meaning that if someone over-compliments you, that is a bad thing, not a good thing. Likewise, you shouldn't praise someone's elegant theory by calling it simplistic. Simplistic means too simple, childish, or incorrectly simple. Nor if you think something is meritorious should you call it meritorious. If you don't know why, you can go home and look it up in the dictionary. In general, one should avoid resorting to a haughty word to replace a more humble synonym. If you do, you might provoke Inigo Montoya's reaction in The Princess Bride when another character kept using the word inconceivable to refer to things that just happened.

He said, he keeps using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. On the other hand, not every annoying bit of grammatical folklore or vaguely remembered lessons from Miss Thistlebottom's classroom is a legitimate rule of thumb. And many supposed rules of usage turn out to violate the grammatical logic of English, turn out to be routinely ignored by the best writers, and often have always been ignored by the best writers, them being a prime example. A recent article in a conservative US opinion magazine argued that this was singularly a feminist plot forced down our throats by angry women's liberationists seeking a gender-neutral means of expression and that we should resist this linguistic engineering and move on.

Let's return to Jane Austin's crystalline prose. Oops. It turns out that Jane Austin used the singular they 87 times in her novels, as in "everyone started to dislike her." Likewise, if you have trouble with the final preposition of the sentence, maybe you should go back and edit Shakespeare, when he wrote "we are the stuff dreams are made of." And the same goes for split infinitives, dangling participles, between you and me, and many other pseudo-rules. In fact, obeying false rules is not only unnecessary, it can often make your prose worse. Here's a quote from a communication I received from my own employer, Harvard University, in one of their boastful newsletters. "David Rockefeller has pledged $100 million to dramatically increase learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates." Now, this writer twisted himself into such a pretzel to avoid a split infinitive that he produced a sentence that, as far as I know, does not belong in the English language.

In fact, obeying false rules can literally lead to a governance crisis...literally. In 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts, who was a famous grammar stickler, was accused of swearing in Barack Obama. And the wording of the oath, as stipulated in the United States Constitution, would be: "I, Barack Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully serve as President of the United States." But Chief Justice Roberts detected a split verb in that oath, so he had Obama say, "I, Barack Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully serve as President of the United States," which not only It is not a stylistic improvement. , but calls into question the legitimacy of the transition of power.

And so they had to repeat the oath in a private ceremony at the White House that same afternoon. So how should a careful writer distinguish legitimate usage rules from bogus ones? Well, the answer is incredibly simple. Look for them. If you turn to a dictionary, say Merriam-Webster, and look up the split infinitive, it will say, "It's okay to split an infinitive for the sake of clarity, since clarity is the usual reason for splitting. This advice simply means that you can divide them whenever you want." Encarta World English Dictionary, "there is no grammatical basis for rejecting split infinitives." American Heritage Dictionary, Random House Dictionary, none of the dictionaries say there is anything wrong with a split infinitive.

So modern dictionaries and style manuals do not endorse fads, grammatical folklore, or false rules. And that's because they base their advice on evidence, on the practices of good contemporary writers, on the practices of the best writers of the past, in some cases on survey data from a panel of writers in controversial cases, on the effects on clarity and coherence with the grammatical logic of English. Additionally, we must keep correct usage in perspective. Now, I think it's a good idea to respect legitimate rules. But in fact, they are the least important part of good writing. Its importance pales behind the maintenance of the classical style, the coherent arrangement of ideas, the overcoming of the curse of knowledge, not to mention factual diligence and solid argumentation.

And furthermore, even when we get in a bad mood over some undoubtable grammatical error, we must keep in mind that these are not signs of language decay. And this is very well captured in a webcomic things". to come. This is the future. And this is the future if you abandon the fight for the word literally." And yes, they are exactly the same. To summarize, I have suggested that modern

linguistics

and cognitive science provide better ways to improve our writing, a model of prose communication, specifically the classical style, in which language is a window to the world; an understanding of how language works, that is, as a way of converting a network of thoughts into a chain of words; a diagnosis of why it is so difficult; writing good prose, i.e. the curse of knowledge; and a way to make sense of the rules of correct usage, i.e. the unspoken and evolving conventions Thanks it seems like the way we acquire words is definitely accelerating. thanks to digital technology.

And I was wondering if you thought the same thing was happening with usage and grammar. Are we seeing an increase in the rate at which things change?