A Failure to Communicate

Steven Pinker (Boston Univ. photo)

Psychology professor Steven Pinker discusses Writing in the 21st Century, a title that actually doesn't do justice to the breadth of the conversation. Some nuggets [bold added]:

language is a combination of two very different mechanisms: powerful rules, which can be applied algorithmically, and lexical irregularities, which must be memorized by brute force: in sum, words and rules.

All languages contain elegant, powerful, logical rules for combining words in such a way that the meaning of the combination can be deduced from the meanings of the words and the way they're arranged. If I say "the dog bit the man" or "the man bit the dog," you have two different images, because of the way those words are ordered by the rules of English grammar.

On the other hand, language has a massive amount of irregularity: idiosyncrasies, idioms, figures of speech, and other historical accidents that you couldn't possibly deduce from rules, because often they are fundamentally illogical. The past tense of "bring" is "brought," but the past tense of "ring" is "rang," and the past tense of "blink" is "blinked."

So being a good writer depends not just on having mastered the logical rules of combination but on having absorbed tens or hundreds of thousands of constructions and idioms and irregularities from the printed page. The first step to being a good writer is to be a good reader: to read a lot, and to savor and reverse-engineer good prose wherever you find it.

[On the Curse of Knowledge]: We as writers often use technical terms, abbreviations, assumptions about typical experimental methods, assumptions about what questions we ask in our research, that our readers have no way of knowing because they haven't been through the same training that we have. Overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer.

When we comment on the direction that intellectual life is going, we should learn to discount our own prejudices, our own natural inclination to say "I and my tribe are entitled to weigh in on profound issues, but members of some other guild or tribe or clique are not." And "My generation is the embodiment of wisdom and experience, and the younger generation is uncouth, illiterate, unwashed and uncivilized."

One of the primary goals of an essay is to convey the writer's understanding of a subject and perhaps persuade the reader to take action. It's usually necessary for the writer to establish his bona fides through the use of technical jargon and/or citing his credentials somewhere in the piece (or through Internet links).

But too much jargon causes distancing; it says don't-question-my-authority-because-I'm-smarter-than-you. Writers often need to choose between communicating or feeding their egos. Too many, unfortunately, choose the latter.