Harvard Professor Explains The Rules of Writing — Steven Pinker

[0:00]I'm here at Harvard in the office of Steven Pinker, and he's written nine books and devoted his life to studying language and cognition and writing. And so what we did in this interview is we started off with a really practical stuff. We started off with his rules for writing. And what makes him unique is that he's been thinking about AI since the 1980s. So if you're interested in doing great nonfiction writing in the age of LLMs, well, this interview is for you. I want to talk about the curse of knowledge, and I want to talk about this this cartoon from your book. Which says, good start. Needs more gibberish. Yes. When I, uh, posed the question, why is there so much bad writing? Why, why is there so much academees and bureaucrates and corporateese? People's favorite answer is captured by that cartoon, namely that bad writing is a deliberate choice. That it's uh, in various versions, it's academics with nothing to say, dress up banal ideas with gobbly gook to show how sophisticated they are. Or uh, pasty faced nerds get revenge on the girls who turned them down for dates in high school. Uh, people want to uh uh, erect a kind of uh cult that no one else outsiders can't penetrate because they haven't learned the, the, uh the jargon. I don't think that's the best explanation for bad writing. Uh, partly it's personal. I just know enough people who have plenty to say, they're brilliant people. They uh have no desire to officegate. They're just uh incompetent, they just uh don't know how to express themselves clearly. There's something called Hamlin's razor. Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity. And uh then these are not stupid people I'm talking about, but it's a kind of stupidity in not knowing, um, where your audience is coming from. And I illustrated with an anecdote uh of a conference in technology, entertainment and design, better known by its acronym, Ted. Where a uh brilliant molecular biologist had been invited to present his uh latest findings. He launched into uh what was obvious to me is the exact kind of talk that he would give to his peers in molecular biology. And that uh within about four seconds, he had lost everyone because he just spoke in jargon without even introducing what problem he was solving, why it was significant. It was, you know, launched right into the experiments. And there was a room of several hundred people from many walks of life, from, you know, to entertainment, from design. And is obvious to everyone in the room that no one was understanding a word, obvious to everyone except the distinguished biologist, who was just clueless. Now, this is, you know, not a stupid man, but he was very stupid when it came to communication. namely not everyone knows what you know, that the curse of knowledge, a term from economics is um the difficulty that we all have in knowing what it's like not to know something that we know. That is to subtract something from your brain, put yourselves in the shoes of your, your audience, your whether it be in public speaking or in writing. Figure out where they're coming from, what do they know, what don't they know? I think that's the main cause of bad writing. You get um uh abbreviations and acronyms that no one has any way of knowing. You have jargon that is known only to a tiny little clique. You have um abstractions, the level of the stimulus was, uh, proportional to the intensity of the reaction. And what it really means is that uh, you know, people kids look longer at a bunny than a uh a truck. Uh, so that is it, it's so familiar to you that you don't think it's worth explaining to people concretely what they're supposed to be seeing. All of these are manifestations of the curse of knowledge. Goes by other names, egocentrism, absence of a theory of mind, that is a theory of what's going on in other people's minds. And I, if I had to identify the, the single biggest flaw in writing and communication, it would be that. That's it. So, when you're writing your books, I know you go up to Cape Cod and you write for like, you know, as long as you possibly can. Now, I would assume that one way to get around the curse of knowledge is just to talk to the kinds of people who would be reading your book. Yeah, you show it to people. So what do you do? What do you do? Because you, you know, you write really intensely. So when you're writing, how do you get around that? Well, I do something that is, I know is not good enough, but I do it as as best I can, which is, I try to imagine what it's like for someone not to know what I know. That is I I try to cultivate my sense of empathy. But the problem with the curse of knowledge is, you don't know when you're subject to the curse of knowledge. Because something that seems so obvious to you that you don't even question whether other people know, it turns out not to be obvious. So anyway, I try, uh, but at the end of the day, I show it to people. Uh, when my mother was alive, I would always show her a uh a draft of my book. Not for the reason that most academics site with, namely, referring to my mother as the epitome of a, you know, unsophisticated, you know, not very well read, not very bright person. My mother was uh extremely intelligent, extremely well read, a very sophisticated, but she wasn't a cognitive psychologist. She wasn't a psycholinguist. She didn't know what I knew. And you know, when I write, I don't write for does a random sample the population. They don't, they don't buy my books. Um, I, I write for people who are intellectually curious, who have some degree of education. However, not for peers in my field. Uh, and so, my mother being an example, but also, of course, when you publish for a commercial publisher, you have an editor, and the editor is typically, you know, very smart, but again, not in your field. And I show it to people in different fields who are academics, but it's surprising how uh insular even academics are when it comes to other academics. Sometimes there'll be people here in this building in my own department, sometimes my own subdivision within my own department, like students, they'll give me their thesis proposal and I just don't know what they're talking about. Sometimes in my own field because they've been immersed in like five or six people in their lab. The their supervisor and the other grad students and a couple of post docs and a research assistant, and they've all been consuming the same jargon, that as soon as they step outside that tiny little circle, they're unible.

[7:05]Yeah. In terms of your writing, you've done so much work looking at vision and how the brain works. And it seems like a lot of your writing advice is informed by that. Like, I guess if I were to try to summarize that, it's like a lot of our brain and basically the way that we move through the world is indexed heavily on vision. And so writing well means being concrete and helping people see what it is that you're trying to write. Is that a good way of describing it? Yes, and that would be my, probably the second, second advice on the list. The first one being, find some way of getting into, get into your readers' heads, but don't just depend on your ability to get in their heads, actually get a flesh and blood person to actually read it and see if it makes any sense to them. So that'd be number one. Number two is, you know, I study language and you know, as a writer, I live in language. But language is kind of overrated in the sense that what understanding consists of is not a bunch of words. It's not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but language is a means to an end of getting people to appreciate what your, the ideas you're trying to convey, which are not just a string of verbiage. And those ideas very often are visual. You know, and and motoric, that is, you know, bodily, emotional, auditory, but they're, they're sensory. Um, or there even conceptual, but they aren't just a bunch of vowels and consonants. And so, constantly allowing your reader to be able to form a mental image uh based on what you're writing is the next key to, to, to, to good writing. That is, don't talk about a uh a stimulus if you mean a uh a bunny rabbit. Right. Uh, don't talk about a a level or a perspective or a framework or a paradigm or a concept. All of which mean a lot to you in your day-to-day work, but no one can form an image of a paradigm in their mind's eye. So, how do you do that? Like one thing that you've said is, use, for example, all the time. Uh, what else can we do? Um, so often, you know, visual metaphors, uh are are helpful. One of the reasons that often the the prose of other eras strikes us as so much more vivid is I was going to say, lush. Lush, yes. Partly because they had the advantage of uh writing before there were several hundred years of academia and intellectuals inventing terms and abstractions.

[9:44]And they had to appeal to images that were part of people's common knowledge. So instead of saying something like aggression, um, or anti-social behavior, they might say the spirit of the hawk needed into our flesh. Yes. Uh, you know, we wouldn't write like that because we can say, you know, aggression or anti-social behavior. But, uh, and that's jargon that a lot of people are familiar with, but they weren't always with us. And before that, there had to be some way of referring to it in terms of an image that everyone shared. And I think that's why often the writing of previous centuries just strikes us as so much more, more gripping, so much more evocative and powerful that they had to appeal to visual metaphors. Yeah, I've never thought about that before. Because a lot of the Bible's like that. I think if, like, I don't know why the owl of Minerva came to mind, like there's just all this symbolism in, in, in animals, it always is, uh, is striking. And so what you're saying is like a lot of the concepts that academics and, and, and people brought in, obviously they're kind of a more efficient way to communicate, but they do lack that kind of visual quality that makes writing vivid. That's right. So they, they do make it in fact, they're essential for doing the work within the profession. Um, you have to be able, you know, if you're a biologist, you have to be able to talk about things like ecosystems and species and systems and reagents and uh potentiation. All these concepts that you don't want to have to go back to basics and talk about, well, there's a certain amount of chemicals and we call that a concentration. And when it increases over time, we call it, you know, you're beyond that, after your freshman. And so you have more and more abstract terms that you could refer to enormous bodies of knowledge just with like two syllables, that's very good. The problem is that then now when it's time to convey them to someone who isn't at the pinnacle of of specialization in your field, because of the curse of knowledge, you're apt to forget that these abstractions, which are kind of basic to you, are just don't even need to be defined, aren't basic to anyone else. Hmm. What do we need to know about writers about how hard writing is? And I mean it in this way, speaking comes so naturally to us, but then writing is something that we sort of have to learn. Right? You watch a kid and you talk to a parent who has a 20 month old, they're like, yeah, you know, they're speaking now, they're like, oh, you know, you wouldn't believe it, you know, they're talking so much. They're crawling around, and then it's always like, yeah, it's like that. And then you talk to them who have a parents who have an eight year old kid's like, how's the writing going? It's like, well, you know, it's gone a little slow. There's not that same excitement. And so it's as if, like, what, why is it that writing is so unnatural in a way that speaking is so natural? Like, what is going on there scientifically and then practically? I a number of things. One of them is that in, um, in conversation, uh, you don't never have two people that are kind of parachuted on a stage and immediately have to begin a conversation. They have some common ground to begin with. They know why they're there, they're talking about something that is in the air, that they're both familiar with, that was the reason for them having the conversation in in the first place. Uh, they can get away with using terms that in context are perfectly clear like this and that and the thing and what I was talking about and uh, she. Uh, whereas if you are not privy to that little social circle, you may not know who they're referring to. Um, in writing, you're wrenched from the context. Someone's picking a book up off the shelf and, you know, they've never met you. And, and they may they may live in a different country, you might be dead. Uh, they've got to pick up all of this detail from what's there on the page, not what's in, not the common ground that the two people bring to the conversation. Uh, also, you know, when you're speaking, you know that you're speaking to someone. You know, they're idiosyncrasies, you're a little bit better at, uh, avoiding the curse of knowledge, partly because you get feedback. Right. Like the furrowed brow, the quizzical expression, the uh, the, the what the request for clarification, I'm sorry, I just don't know what you're talking about. Uh, in real time, and you know, the body language, the engagement, uh, even in a, in a live audience, uh, any speaker knows when people are starting to fidget and, and, and drift off, as opposed to continuing to be riveted. None of that is available in, uh, in writing.