“The Sense of Style: The Thinking Persons’ Guide to Writing in the 21st Century” with Steven Pinker
November 18th, 2015
Wednesday, November 18th, 2015 at 8:00 PM
NOTE: This lecture will take place at Cary Hall on a Wednesday (not our usual Saturday).
Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist at Harvard, cognitive scientist and linguist, has been named as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals, and has written ten books including The Language Instinct and The Better Angels of our Nature. In The Sense of Style, he asks why so much writing is so bad. We can’t blame bloviators, the Internet or today’s youth; good writing has always been hard. Rather than worrying about the decline of the language or recycling spurious edicts from century-old rulebooks, we can apply insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.
Do people write badly on purpose, to bamboozle their readers with highfalutin gobbledygook? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Should we bring back the lost art of diagramming sentences? Have dictionaries abandoned their responsibility to safeguard correct usage? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care? Professor Pinker argues that we need to rethink usage advice for the 21st century. Rather than moaning about the decline of the language, carping over pet peeves, or recycling spurious edicts from the rulebooks of a century ago, we can apply insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.
Don’t blame the Internet, or the kids today; good writing has always been hard. It begins with savoring the good prose of others. It requires an act of imagination: maintaining the illusion that one is directing a reader’s gaze to something in the world. A writer must overcome the Curse of Knowledge—the difficulty we all have in imagining what it’s like not to know something we know. Skillful writers must be sensitive to the ways in which syntax converts a tangled web of ideas into a linear string of words. They must weave their prose into a coherent whole, with one sentence flowing into the next. And they must negotiate the rules of correct usage, distinguishing the rules that enhance clarity and grace from the myths and superstitions.
Biography
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-born American, a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received eight honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,”Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”
This lecture has already taken place! To watched the video online, click here.
