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

Why is so much writing so bad? Why do we have to struggle with so much legalese? As in, "The revocation by these Regulations of a provision previously revoked subject to savings does not affect the continued operations." Why do we put up with academese? As in, "It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation 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? [LAUGHTER] There's no shortage of theories; and the one

that I hear most often is captured in this cartoon, in which a boss says to a tech writer, "Good start. Needs more gibberish." That is, that bad writing is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to evade responsibility. Pasty-faced nerds get their revenge on the girls who turned them down for dates in high school; and the jocks who kicked sand in their faces. Pseudo-intellectuals try to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook, disguising the fact that they have nothing to say. Well, I have no doubt that the bamboozlement theory is true of some writers some of

the time; but as a general explanation, it doesn't ring true. I know many scientists who do groundbreaking work on important topics. They have nothing to hide and no need to impress, but still their writing stinks. Good people can write bad prose. The second most popular theory is that digital media are ruining the language. Google is making us stupid. The digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardises our future. Twitter is forcing 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, such as in the 1980s. Many of you will remember that that was an era in which teenagers spoke in articulate paragraphs. Remember when bureaucrats wrote in plain English and every academic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay? Or was it the '70s? The thing is that complaints about the imminent decline of the language can be found in every era, such as 1961, in which a commentator complained, "recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all." Well, we can then go back

before the advent of radio and television. In 1917, a commentator wrote, "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 you have to go back even earlier to, say, the glory days of the European Enlightenment, such as 1785, in which a commentator 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 said, "Oh, for crying

out loud... you never end a sentence with a little bird." [LAUGHTER] I think a better theory comes from Charles Darwin who wrote, "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." That is, whereas speech is instinctive, writing is and always has been hard. Your readers are unknown, invisible, inscrutable. They exist only in your imagination when you put pen to paper. They can't react or break in or ask for clarification. As a result, writing is an act

of pretense, and writing is an act of craftsmanship. 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, which is that you hand students this, the iconic "The Elements Of Style" by Cornell Professor William Strunk, Jr. and his student, EB White, who later went on to glory as the New Yorker essayist and the author of the children's classics, Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. Note, by the way, that both these men were born before the turn of the century. That

is, before the turn of the 20th century. Now, there is, undoubtedly, a lot of good sense in The Elements of Style. There are little gems of advice like "Use definite, specific, concrete language." "Write with nouns and verbs." "Put the emphatic words at the end." And my favourite, their prime directive, "Omit needless words." —which is, by the way, an excellent example of itself. [LAUGHTER] On the other hand, there are many reasons why The Elements of Style and other traditional style manuals like Fowler's Modern English Usage, probably the closest English equivalent, why they cannot be the basis

of writing advice in the 21st century. For one thing, a lot of the advice is obsolete. Language changes. For example, Strunk and White declared that, "to finalize is a pompous, ambiguous verb." Now, many of you will be surprised to find that this perfectly unexceptionable and useful word would be deemed pompous and ambiguous at the time. But it just happened to be new in Professor Strunk's era. It grated on his ears. He declared it pompous, but it then fell into common usage, and no one even remembers that it was ever considered ungrammatical. Or, "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." Of course, Strunk and White did not live to see the day in which you could also text them, instant message them, tweet them, email them, and so on. Nor did they really appreciate that "to contact" actually is an indispensable verb, because there are some times when you don't care whether one person phones or meets or texts another, as long as they do get in touch with them by one means or another. And for that

purpose, "to contact" is a perfectly useful verb. Some of the advice is baffling, such as this, "the word people is not to be used with words of number, in place of persons." That is, you should not say 'six people'. Why not? Well, "if of 'six people' five went away, how many people would be left? Answer: one people." [LAUGHTER] Did you get that? By the same logic, you should never say, I have two children or 32 teeth. or two feet or any other irregular plural. Or how's this? Note that the word clever means one thing when

applied to people, another when applied to horses. A clever horse is a good-natured one not an ingenious one. [LAUGHTER] The problem with traditional style advice is that it consists of an arbitrary list of dos and don'ts based on the tastes and peeves of the authors. It's not based on a principled understanding of how language works. And as a result, users have no way of understanding and assimilating the advice. And as I've noted, much of the advice is just wrong. I think we can do better today. We can base advice on writing on the science and

scholarship of language, on modern grammatical theory, which is an advance over the old grammars that are ported over from Latin, on evidence-based dictionaries, on research in cognitive science on what makes sentences easy or hard to read, and on historical and critical studies of usage. It all begins with a model of effective prose communication. As I have been emphasising, 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 the writer is trying to accomplish. And my favourite model of this

sort comes from a lovely book by the English scholars Francis-Noël Thomas 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 has seen something in the world that the reader has not yet noticed. He positions the reader so that she can see it with her own eyes. The writer and reader are equals. The goal is to help the reader see objective reality and the style is conversation. Now, that may seem obvious, but classic style is just one of a variety of

styles that they explicate, including contemplative style, oracular style, and practical style. But the one that they argue that infects most academic prose is one they call post-modern or self-conscious style, in which the writer's chief if unstated concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naivete about his own enterprise. They continue. "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." Well, I'd be defying the principles of classic prose if I just talked about it without showing you an example. And here's an example. It is an article by the 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 now expanding, then at ever earlier times the universe must have been ever smaller. At some moment in the distant past, everything we now see, the ingredients responsible for every planet, every star, every galaxy, even space itself, must 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 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 1 by 0, 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, in these few sentences, Greene has covered some fairly 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 in an infinitesimal speck. And even the abstruse mathematical notion of equations breaking down, he presents in a way that anyone can see for themselves. You can either pull out a calculator and try it-- try dividing 1 by 0, and indeed you will get an error message, or you can try to wrap your mind around what it could possibly mean to divide the number 1 into 0 parts. And that is classic style. The reader can see it for herself. Now, many examples of writing advice I think are implications of the

model behind classic prose. To begin with, the focus of classic prose is on the thing being shown, not on the activity of studying it. So here's an example of the kind of prose that I have to wade through during my working day. A typical article in my field might begin as follows-- in recent years, an increasing number of researchers have turned their attention to the problem of child language acquisition. In this article, recent theories of this process will be reviewed. Well, no offence, but not a whole lot of people are all that interested in how

professors spend their time. A more classic introduction to the same subject matter could 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 advisory is to minimise the kind of apologising that academics in particular feel compelled to do. Again, this is the kind of sentence that 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 a great deal of controversy surrounding the theories. More research needs to be done. [LAUGHTER] Now, this is the kind of verbiage that could be deleted at a stroke with no loss in content, because classic prose gives the reader credit for knowing that many concepts are hard to define and many controversies hard to resolve. The reader is there to see what the writer will do about it. Another corollary is to minimise the hedging that is apparently obligatory in academic prose. The sprinkling of

words into prose such a somewhat, fairly, rather, nearly, relatively, seemingly, in part, 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. So here's an example from a letter of recommendation I received. "She is a quick study and has been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her." Well, are we to take this recommendation as saying that the young woman in question is a quick study or that she is a quick study, namely someone who is

only rumoured or alleged to be a quick study but really isn't. And if she's been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her, are there some areas that interest her where she tried to educate herself but just failed? This habit was brought home to me when I came across an acquaintance at an academic conference. We hadn't seen each other in a number of years, and I asked how she was. And as she pulled out a picture of her four-year-old daughter, and she said, we virtually adore her. [LAUGHTER] Aw. Why the compulsive hedging?

Well, there is an imperative in many bureaucracies that the bureaucrats abbreviate as CYA-- cover your anatomy. But there is an alternative in classic style-- so sue me. That is, it's better to be clear and possibly wrong than muddy and, as the physicists say, not even wrong. Also classic prose counts on the cooperative nature of ordinary conversation. The fact that two people in chit-chat will read between the lines and connect the dots so that not everything has to be stated with absolute precision. So if I were to say, well, in recent years Americans have been getting

fatter, you interpret it as meaning on average or in general. You're not going to hold me to the claim that every last one of the 350 million citizens of the United States have all been getting fatter. I call these tendencies professional narcissism, the confusion of the activities of your guild or field or profession with the subject matter that it is designed to deal with. And it is not just a problem in academics, but it infects many professions. News media, for example, will often cover the coverage, giving rise to the notorious media echo chamber. Much coverage

of movies and popular music will tell you all about the first weekend gross receipts and the number of weeks on the charts but say nothing about the actual work of art. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has been bored to tears by the museum display where you get a shard in the showcase and a lengthy explanation of how it fits into a classification of pottery styles. But it says nothing about the people who made it or what they did with it. And many government and business websites will instruct you into the bureaucratic organisation

but have no ready way to find the information that you actually need. A second feature of classic prose is that it keeps up the illusion that the reader is seeing a world rather than just listening to verbiage. And as such, it avoids cliches like the plague. We are all familiar with the kind of writer who dispenses sentences such as we needed to think outside the box in our search for the holy grail but found that it was neither a magic bullet nor a slam dunk. So we rolled with the punches and let the chips fall

where they may while seeing the glass as half full. It's a no-brainer. Now, the problem with writing in cliches is that it either forces the reader to kind of shut down her visual brain and just process the words as blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or if she actually does think through the prose to the underlying image, she'll inevitably be upended by the inevitable mixed metaphors. Here's another sentence from a letter of recommendation I received. "Jeff is a Renaissance man, drilling down to the core issues and pushing the envelope." It's not clear how you

can do all of those at the same time. Or this is from an article in The New York Times. "No one has yet invented a condom that will knock people's socks off." [LAUGHTER] And if you write this way, you will be eligible for membership in AWFUL, that is, Americans Who Figuratively Use Literally. And I'm told there's a British chapter. Now, it is perfectly acceptable to say she literally blushed. It's much more problematic to say she literally exploded. And it's very, very bad to say she literally emasculated him. Now, third, classic prose is about the world.

It's not about the conceptual tools with which we understand the world. And as such, it avoids 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. As in, this is a sentence taken from an editorial by a legal scholar. "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 is to say, I doubt that trying to amend the Constitution would actually succeed, but it may be valuable to aspire to it." Or this from an email I received. "It is important to approach the subject from a variety of strategies, including mental health assistance, 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. [LAUGHTER] Classic prose narrates ongoing events. We see agents who perform actions that affect objects. Non-classic prose thingifies the events and then refers to them with a single

word using a dangerous tool of English grammar called nominalization, turning a verb or an adjective into a noun. So instead of appearing, you make an appearance. Instead of organising something, you bring about the organisation of that thing. Helen Sword, a language scholar, calls them zombie nouns, because they kind of lumber across the page with no conscious agent actually directing the action. And they can turn prose into a Night of the Living Dead. Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word, which is another way of saying

people saw sentences, each followed by the word true or false. Subjects were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation, to wit, we tested the students in a quiet room. But again, it is not just academics who have this bad habit. It is also politicians. When a hurricane threatened the Republican Party National Convention a few years ago, Florida Governor Rick Scott said, "right now there is not any anticipation there will be a cancellation." That is, right now we don't anticipate that we will have to cancel it. And just to be nonpartisan, on the other

side of the American political spectrum, here we have Secretary of State John Kerry saying "the president is desirous of trying to see how we can make our best efforts in order to find a way to facilitate." In other words, the president wants to help. [LAUGHTER] And corporate consultants. A young man interviewed by a journalist explained that he is a digital and social media strategist. "I deliver programmes, products, and strategies to our corporate clients across the spectrum of communications 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 he said, "I teach big companies how to use Facebook." [LAUGHTER] And product engineers. Portable generators and combustion heaters used to carry a warning more or less like this-- "mild exposure to CO can result in accumulated damage over time. Extreme exposure to CO may rapidly be fatal without producing significant warning symptoms." Yeah, yeah. Whatever. And as a result, several hundred Americans every year turn their houses into gas chambers and asphyxiated themselves and their families by running heaters and generators indoors, until they replaced the warning with this one-- "using

a generator indoors can kill you in minutes." [LAUGHTER] So classic prose can literally be a matter of life and death. Yes, literally. So part two. How can an understanding of the design of leaving 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, such as the dog bit the man, and a sentence like the man was bitten by the dog, in the passive voice. It's well known that the passive voice is overused by academics, as in, 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. For passives in one sentence. And lawyers. If the outstanding balance is prepaid in full, the unearned finance charge will be refunded. Three passives. But perhaps most infamously of all, politicians. Here we have one of candidates for president in the United States, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who in explaining how it was that his administration caused a three-hour traffic jam by deliberately closing the lanes to a tunnel during rush hour in order to punish the mayor

of a town that would not endorse his re-election, he said, "mistakes were made." The infamous politician's evasive passive. Not surprisingly, all of the traditional manuals warn against using the passive voice. Strunk and White 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'm glad to hear from the laughter that a number of people have noted that, yes, Strunk

and White used the passive in order to tell people not to use the passive. The other iconic bit of writing advice is the classic essay, Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, probably the second-most widely distributed bit of advice on writing. And Orwell too says, "a mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose," he wrote in 1949, showing that some things don't change. "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 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 did not serve some purpose. Why can't we do without it even when telling people not to overuse it? It comes down to the design of language. You can think of language as an app for converting a web of thoughts into a string of words. Now, the writer's knowledge can be thought of as a

kind of mind-wide web what cognitive psychologists call a semantic network. That is, a collection of nodes for concepts. Here we have a fragment of a person's knowledge of the tragic events brought to life by Sophocles in his play Oedipus Rex. So you've got a number of nodes for concepts like father, kill, marry. You've got a bunch of links that indicate how the concepts are related. Doer, done to, about, is, and so on. Now, when you just lie back and ponder your knowledge base, your mind can surf from one concept to another in pretty much any

order. But what happens when you have to translate your web of ideas into a sentence? Well, now you've got to convert that tangled web into a linear string of words. In Sophocles play, Oedipus married his mother and killed his father. That means that there's an inherent problem baked into the design of language. The order of words in a sentence has to do two things at once. It's the code that English syntax uses to express who did what to whom. At the same time, it necessarily presents some bits of information to the reader before others and

thereby affects how the information is going to be absorbed. In particular, the early material in the sentence refers to the sentence's topic and naturally connects back to what's already reverberating in the reader's mind. In the metaphor of classic prose, it refers to the general direction in which the reader is looking. The later words in the sentence contain the sentence's focal point, what fact it is now conveying. In the metaphor, it's what the reader is supposed to now notice. Any prose that violates these principles, even if each sentence is clear, will feel choppy or disjointed or

incoherent. And that brings us to the passive. The passive is a workaround in English for this inherent design limitation of the language. It allows writers to convey the same ideas, namely who did what to whom, while varying the order of words. In particular, it allows a writer to start the sentence with the done to or the acted upon rather than the doer or the actor. And that's why avoid the passive as a general law is bad advice. The passive is, in fact, the better construction when the done to or the acted upon is currently the

target of the reader's mental gaze. Again, I'll give you an example. This comes from the Wikipedia entry for Oedipus Rex, and it describes the pivotal moment in the play in which the horrific backstory is revealed to the audience. Spoiler alert. "A messenger arrives from Corinth. It emerges that he was formerly a shepherd on Mount Kithaeron, and during that time he was given a baby. The baby, he said, was given to him by another shepherd from the Laius household, who had been told to get rid of the child." Now notice that this passage has three passive

sentences in a row and for good reason. As the passage opens, our eyes are on the messenger-- a messenger arrives from Corinth-- and so the next sentence telling us something about the messenger should begin with a reference to the messenger, and thanks to the passive voice, so it does. He, the messenger, was given a baby. Well, now we're kind of figuratively looking at the baby, at least our mind's eye is, and the next sentence should then begin with the baby. And again, thanks to the passive voice, it does. The baby was given to the messenger

by another shepherd. Well, now we're looking at this new shepherd and the next sentence telling us something about him should begin with that. And again, the passive makes that possible. The other shepherd had been told to get rid of the child. Now imagine that the writer of this passage had either followed the advice in the traditional manuals literally or was the victim of the kind of copyeditor that turns every passive sentence back into an active, then you would have a messenger arrives from Corinth. It emerges that he was formerly a shepherd on Mount Kithaeron, and

during that time someone gave him a baby. Another shepherd from the Laius household, he says, whom someone had told to get rid of a child, gave the baby to him. Now, I think you will agree that this is not an improvement. Your attention is kind of jerked around from one part of the story to another. And participants kind of parachute in without warning or a proper introduction. More generally, English syntax provides writers with constructions that vary the order in the string while preserving the meaning. Oedipus killed Laius. Laius was killed by Oedipus. It was Laius

whom Oedipus killed. It was Oedipus who killed Laius, and so on. And writers must choose the construction that introduces ideas to the reader in the order in which she can absorb them. Well, why then is the passive so common in bad writing, as it surely is? 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 the event, because they know how it happened. And then they throw

in the cause as an afterthought, and the passive makes that all too easy. So why should this be so hard? Why is it so hard for writers to deploy the resources made available by the English language to convey ideas effectively? The best explanation that I know of is conveyed by this cartoon, and it's called the curse of knowledge. The fact that when you know something, it's hard to imagine what it's like for someone else not to know it. Psychologists give it various names. It's also called mind blindness, egocentrism, hindsight bias, about half a dozen others.

Perhaps the best introduction comes from a classic experiment that will be familiar to any of you taking a course in child psychology, the M&M study or in Britain you can call it the Smarties Study. A three-year-old boy comes into a lab, sits down at a table. The experimenter gives him a box of Smarties. He's all excited. He opens it, and he finds that instead of containing Smarties, the box contains pencils. So the child is surprised. And the experimenter puts the pencils back in the box, closes it, puts it back down on the table. And he

says, OK. Well, now another little boy is going to come in, Jason. What does Jason think is in the box? And the boy will say pencils. Even though, of course, Jason has no way of knowing that the box contains pencils, the boy knows it, but a newcomer would not. And in fact, if you ask him, well, when you came into the room, what did you think was in the box? And he'll say pencils. Now that he knows it, he can no longer recover the innocent state in which he once did not know it. Now adults,

of course, outgrow this limitation-- kind of, a little-- because many studies have shown a similar effect in adults. People will tend to attribute their own obscure vocabulary to the population at large. If they know of fact, they assume everyone else does. And in one study, the more practise someone had at using a complicated gadget like a smartphone, the less time they estimated it would take someone else to learn it, because the more familiar the were, the obviously easier it must be, because it was easy for them. I think that the curse of knowledge is the

chief contributor to opaque writing. It simply 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't visualise a scene that's currently in the writer's mind's eye. And so the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon or spell out the logic or supply the concrete details, even when writing for professional peers. It's a lazy excuse that writers often have that they don't have to spell things out 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'll give you an example. This is a passage from an article on consciousness written in a journal called Trends In Cognitive Science, which is designed to present short, readable summaries of research for the benefit of cognitive scientists keeping up with one another's work. So here's a passage. "The slow and integrative nature of conscious perception is confirmed behaviorally by observation such as the "rabbit illusion" and its variants or the way in which a stimulus is ultimately perceived, is influenced by post-stimulus events arising several hundreds of milliseconds after

the original stimulus." Now, 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, though I know an awful lot of 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 I found one that had an entry for something called the cutaneous rabbit illusion, which works as follows-- the subject closes his eyes, sticks out his arm. The

experimenter taps him three times on the wrist, three times on the elbow, three times on the shoulder. And the person experiences it as a series of taps running up the length of his arm, kind of like a hopping rabbit, hence the rabbit illusion. Well, why didn't they just say that? Not only is it no less scientific to spell out the concrete scenario, but it's actually more scientific because knowing that that's what the rabbit illusion is, I can then follow the logic of what they are claiming, namely what it allegedly shows us is consciousness does not

track sensory events in real time. But our brain is constantly editing our experience after the fact to make it feel more coherent. Well, knowing what the illusion actually consists of, I can then ponder whether that really follows, whether that's a correct interpretation of the illusion or whether it might have some alternative explanation, something that I can't do with stimulus this and post-stimulus that. The temptations of thoughtless abbreviation are I think best captured by an old joke. So a man walks into a Catskills resort in Upstate New York and walks into the dining room, and he

sees a bunch of retired Borscht Belt comedians sitting around a table. And so there's an empty chair. He joins them. And he hears one of the comedians saying 47, and the others break out into uproarious laughter. Another one says 112, and then again they all just burst out into peals of laughter, rolling on the floor. And he can't figure out what's going on. So he asked the guy next to him. He says, what's happening? And the guy says, well, you know, these old timers, they've been together for so long, that they all though the same

jokes. So to save time, they've given each joke a number, and now they just have to say the number. They guy says, that's ingenious. I'll try it. So he says 31. Stony silence. He says 77. Everyone stares at him. No one laughs. So he sinks back down into his seat and he says to his friend, uh, what happened? Why didn't anyone laugh? The guy says, well, it's all in the way you tell it. [LAUGHTER] So how do you exercise the curse of knowledge? Well, the traditional solution is always keep in mind the reader over your

shoulder. That is, empathise with your reader, see the world from her point of view, try to feel her pain, walk a mile in her moccasins, and so on. 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, really hard. A better solution is to actually show a draft to a real-live representative reader, and you will often discover that what's obvious to you isn't 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 did I mean by that, or all too often, who wrote this crap? [LAUGHTER] And then rewrite, ideally several times, with the single goal of making the prose understandable to the reader. Finally, how should we think about correct usage of what is right or wrong, correct or incorrect? Which is the aspect of writing that by far attracts the most attention and arouses the most emotion.

Now, some usages are clearly wrong. There is a famous and beloved American children's character known as Cookie Monster, who's famous on the Muppets and Sesame Street, whose signature line is, "me 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 error. Many of you may be familiar with the form of humour or alleged humour called the lolcat, as in I can has cheezburger, the humour in which resides in the fact that this cat is incompetent at English grammar. If

we didn't recognise that the cat was making a grammatical error, we would not find it funny, at least those people who do find it funny. [LAUGHTER] Is our children learning? Even ex-president 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, just again to be nonpartisan, the Democratic President Bill Clinton, when he was running for office in 1992, had as one of his campaign slogans "give Al Gore and I a chance to bring

America back," appalling the nation's English teachers who pointed out that this is an example of the notorious between you and I error. 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 what they look like. The infamous singular "they" error. Captain Kirk of Star Trek, the five-year mission of the Starship Enterprise, "to boldly go where no man has gone before." Split infinitive. The Beatles, "you think you lost your love. Well, I saw her

yesterday. It's you she's thinking of, and she told me what to say." Anyone? Sentence with a preposition at the end. Preposition at the end of a sentence. And then I doubt many people will recognise this American icon. This is Dick Cavett, who was the host of our short-lived and much-missed urbane, witty, intelligent talk show. And in an Op Ed in which he was talking about a college reunion, he wrote "checking into the hotel, it was nice to see a few of my old classmates in the lobby." Anyone? [INTERPOSING VOICES] Anyone go to school before the

1960s? Yes. It's a dangling participle. Well, what do we do with these more contested usage errors? They have given rise to what journalists sometimes called the language war. On the one side, there are the prescriptivists who prescribe how people ought to speak and write. They are also known as the purists, sticklers, pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots, nitpickers, traditionalists, language police, usage nannies, grammar Nazis, and the gotcha gang, according to whom rules of usage are objectively correct. To obey them is to uphold standards of excellence. To flout them is to dumb down literate culture, degrade the language,

and hasten the decline of civilization. Now, according to the scenario, on the other hand side, we have the descriptivists, who describe how people do speak and write, according to whom rules of usage are just the secret handshake of the ruling class, and the people should be liberated to write however they please. Now, I think there are reasons to believe that the language war, however beloved it is of certain magazines, is a pseudo-controversy. If it were really true, then the prescriptivists would have to insist that the lyrics to the famous Beatles song should be, it's you

of whom she's thinking. And the descriptivists would have to claim that there is nothing wrong with I can has cheezburger, in which case they could not get the joke of the lolcat. I think we need a more sophisticated way of thinking about usage. So what are rules of usage? Where do they come from? They're certainly not logical truth that you could prove in the propositional calculus, nor are they officially regulated by dictionaries. And I can speak with some authority here, because I am 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 answer was, "we pay attention to the way people use words." That is, when it comes to correctness, there's no one in charge. The lunatics are running the asylum. [LAUGHTER] So a way to make sense of rules of usage is that they are tacit, evolving conventions. A convention is a way of doing things that has no particular advantages other than the fact that everyone else is doing it. Paper currency is an example. A

piece of paper with a picture of the queen has no inherent value other than the fact that everyone expects everyone else to treat it as having value. There's no particular reason to drive on the right as opposed to driving on the left. There's nothing sinister about driving in the left or gauche or socialist. [LAUGHTER] But there's an excellent reason to drive on the left on this side of the Atlantic, namely that's what everyone else does. Unlike the rules of traffic or laws authorising currency, though, the rules of language are tacit. They emerge as a rough

consensus within a community of careful writers without explicit deliberation, agreement, or legislation. And the conventions evolve, as I mentioned in the case of "to finalise and to contact," they organically change over time. So should writers follow the rules? And the answer is, it depends. Some rules just extend the logic of everyday grammar to more complicated cases. So let's take is our children learning, which not only George W. Bush but the Microsoft Word grammar checker flags as an error with the famous wiggly green line. "Is our children learning" is equivalent to "our children is learning." Everyone

can see that "our children is learning" is ungrammatical, and therefore "is our children learning" is also ungrammatical. Or a slightly more complicated case, the impact of the cuts have not been felt yet. Why did Microsoft Word put a wiggly line under that? Well, when you think about it, that sentence is "the impact have not been felt." If you delete the optional "of the cuts," that just jumps off the page as ungrammatical. Of course, it's "impact has not been felt," and so it's "the impact of the cuts has not been felt." The writer was just distracted

by the plural cuts that happened to be cheek by jowl with the verb have. Also, there are some rules of word choice that make important semantic distinctions. Fulsome is not a fancy-schmancy synonym for full. Fulsome means excessive or insincere. And so one ought not to thank someone for their fulsome compliment, that is, that if someone gives you a fulsome compliment, that's a bad thing, not a good thing. Likewise, you should not compliment someone's elegant theory by calling it simplistic. Simplistic means overly simple or childlike or incorrectly simple. Nor if you think that something is meritorious

should you call it meretricious. If you don't know why, you can go home and look it up in the dictionary. In general, one should avoid reaching for a hoity-toity word to replace a humbler synonym. If you do, you might elicit the reaction of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride when another character kept using the word inconceivable to refer to things that just happened. He said, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. On the other hand, not every pet peeve bit of grammatical folklore or dimly remembered lesson

from Miss Thistlebottom's classroom is a legitimate rule of usage. And many supposed rules of usage turn out to violate the grammatical logic of English, turn out to be routinely flouted by the best writers, and often have always been flouted by the best writers, singular they being an excellent example. A recent article in a conservative opinion magazine in the United States argued that singular they was a feminist plot that had been forced down our throats by angry women's liberationists in search of a gender neutral means of expression and that we should resist this linguistic engineering and

go back to the crystalline prose of Jane Austin. Whoops. Turns out that Jane Austin used singular they 87 times in her novels, as in "everybody began to have their vexation." Likewise, if you've got a problem with sentence final preposition, maybe you should go back and edit Shakespeare, when he wrote "we are such stuff as dreams are made on." And the same is true of split infinitives, dangling participles, between you and I, and many other pseudo-rules. In fact, not only is obeying bogus rules unnecessary, it can often make prose worse. Here is a sentence from a

communication that I got from my own employer, Harvard University, in one of its boastful newsletters. "David Rockefeller has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates." Now, this writer twisted himself into such a pretzel to avoid a split infinitive that he churned out a sentence that, as far as I can tell, does not belong to the English language. [LAUGHTER] In fact, obeying bogus rules can literally lead to a crisis in governance-- literally. In 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts, who was a famous grammatical stickler, was charged with administering the oath of office to

Barack Obama. And the wording of the oath of office, as stipulated in the US Constitution would be "I, Barack Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States." But Chief Justice Roberts spotted a split verb in that oath, and so he had Obama say "I, Barack Obama, do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of President of the United States faithfully," which not only is not a stylistic improvement, but it calls the legitimacy of the transition of power into question. And so they had to repeat the

oath of office in a private ceremony in the White House later that afternoon. So how should a careful writer distinguish legitimate rules of usage from bogus ones? Well, the answer is unbelievably simple. Look them up. If you turn to a dictionary, say Merriam-Webster's, and look up split infinitive, it will say, "it's all right to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity since clarity is the usual reason for splitting this advice means merely that you can split them whenever you want to." Encarta World English Dictionary, "there is no grammatical basis for rejecting split infinitives." American

Heritage Dictionary, Random House Dictionary, none of the dictionaries say that there's anything wrong with a split infinitive. So modern dictionaries and style manuals do not ratify pet peeves, grammatical folklore, or bogus rules. And that's because they base their advice on evidence, on the practises of contemporary good writers, on the practises of the best writers in the past, in some cases on polling data from a panel of writers in contested cases, on effects on clarity, and on consistency with the grammatical logic of English. Also, we should keep correct usage in perspective. Now, I do think that

it is a good idea to respect the legitimate rules. But in fact, they're the least important part of good writing. They pale in significance behind maintaining classic style, coherent ordering of ideas, overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of factual diligence and sound argumentation. And also, even when we get grumpy about some undoubtedly grammatical error, we should keep in mind that they are not signs of the decline of language. And this is nicely captured in an XKCD webcomic by Randall Munroe, in which he shows a purist who is haunted by a vision of things

to come, by a ghost in the middle of the night, and says "I bring a cautionary vision of things to come. This is the future. And this is the future if you give up the fight over the word literally." [LAUGHTER] And yes, they are exactly the same. So to sum up, I've suggested that modern linguistics and cognitive science provide better ways of enhancing our writing, a model of prose communication, namely classic style, in which language is a window on the world; an understanding of the way language works, namely as a way of converting 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 of correct usage, namely tacit, evolving conventions. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] It seems as thought the way in which we're acquiring words is definitely speeding up because of digital technology. And I was wondering if you thought the same was happening with usage and grammar. Are we seeing an increase in the pace at which things are changing?