Posts tagged May 2022
Writing and Rationality
 
Collage of pinking shears and pinked scraps of paper
 
 

I couldn't resist using a pair of pinking shears to create this paper collage, in homage to my recent WriteSPACE Special Event guest Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in Psychology at Harvard University.

The English verb pink, which dates back to the 14th century, means "pierce, stab, make holes in."  But the purpose of pinking shears is not destructive -- quite the opposite.  The zigzag pattern of the blades prevents woven cloth from fraying and produces a decorative edge reminiscent of the common garden flowers called pinks.  

Steven Pinker's prose style, likewise, is incisive yet elegant, hole-punching yet healing, piercing yet humane.  Whether you know him as a distinguished psycholinguist, a fearless social commentator, a consummate prose stylist, or all of the above, I hope you'll be as pleased as I was that he gave up an hour and a half of his precious sabbatical leave to visit us in the WriteSPACE on May 4.

In the first 90 minutes of this live 2-hour Special Event, I engaged Steve in a wide-ranging conversation about his background and evolution as a writer, his personal and professional sense of style, and -- with a nod toward his most recent book, Rationality -- the role of rationality in academic and professional writing.  The final half hour featured a hands-on “reverse engineering” workshop inspired by his 2015 book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.  

Here are some comments made by last week's Virtual Writing Studio participants about the Pinking Shears collage, before I revealed that it had anything to do with Steven Pinker:

  • Marie (Texas, USA):
    Crafting, assembling, designing… Piece by piece, square by square, a mission is underway and a new world unfolds. We will wake up to a newly fashioned environment; not a moment too soon.

  • Nina (Brisbane, Australia):
    A wedding planner swimming! Karen Barad's agential realism uses the concept of "cut-together-apart."

  • Lorna (Scotland, UK):
    I like the jigsaw-like qualities of the pinked edges.

  • Lynne (Brighton, UK):
    The serration creates more edge surface on the blade, which concentrates its cutting power. Compacted, it does more.

  • Anita (Cape Town, South Africa):
    Snipping work into bite sized chunks is a strategy to move work forward.

  • Vicky (Essex, UK):
    It reminds me of how I edited my PhD -- I would restructure by printing out, cutting up, and sticking together.

  • Hussain (Indonesia):
    Lies against purple background with its mouth wide open from exhaustion.

  • Eva (Germany):
    Rethinking a journal article: the open scissors point different directions the article could go; the black frame for requiring a clear framework; and the paper fragments and flowers for playing around creatively with ideas.

  • Ramón (Melbourne, Australia):
    It’s a puzzle, any piece can be matched with any other. Since they are all the same form, there is not just one solution.

And here is WriteSPACE member Nina Ginsberg’s lively account of the live event:

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I found the discussion between Helen Sword and Steven Pinker insightful and inspiring. A few standout ideas for me were Steven’s observations that most writers don't consult style manuals, they consume good prose and devote attention to why it is good, clear and affecting writing – and by default these people assimilate an inventory of good writing. Another gem was Pinker’s comment that at university, it is not the undergraduates that are the ‘bad writers’, but the (post)grads, because they are often drawing on jargon from a small clique of scholars and need to ‘prove their work’ so it is often very hedged and qualified (that's me!). As a teacher, I was impressed with Pinker’s generosity in sharing his Rationality class materials. This made me reflect on alternative ways scholars, teachers and writers can share their work beyond mainstream publication. 

A few other takeaways I garnered were: that Pinker avoids using parenthetical; he is conscious that every new equation included in a book ‘cuts the readership in half’; he harnesses the power of well-placed jokes, humour and concrete, relatable, witty examples to highlight specific concepts...and as always...he knows the importance of having a good ending to paragraphs. At one stage, Pinker mused about the many spatial and temporal contours of prepositions (you fill in a form, but also fill a form out) and that ‘up’ has a completion and vertical ‘sense’ about it...what Pinker called a ‘spectral sense’. I enjoy listening in to other writers ‘think out loud’ like this my favorite example of this is a private recording of Dr Oliver Sacks trying to find the right words as he writes.

*In my draft of this piece, I had this phrase originally in parenthesis, but took it out as a homage to Pinker, but then realized I needed parenthesis if I were to include this annotation in-text, so I popped it here. (Oh, the irony!) ...and there they are again. - argghh! I tried Steven! Your ideas on writing continue to challenge me! NG.

Later on, the conversation turned to Pinker's writing process. He outlined his 6-stage drafting process which included a brain dump, a ‘frankenchapter’ (a term I love and will be using with relish!), sending it his mum to read as she is his trusted go to non-academic reader-feedbacker, then after a few more drafts, he does one last, slow edit for reasoning at the end to improve the prose. To wrap up, Steven shared a few sample texts and explained the deliberate techniques he embedded in the writing and organization. This metathinking about how writers use words, logic and literary devices is what keeps me coming back to WriteSPACE events like this!  

A big thanks to Helen and Steven for sharing their time, expertise and ideas so generously. If you did not attend or have not yet watched the recording, make a cup of tea, get comfortable and enjoy this wonderful discussion about writing and rationality. 

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And a big thanks to you, Nina, for sharing your comments! A video of my conversation with Steven Pinker is now available for members in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member yet? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.


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Weighty Words
 
 
 

Last week, I received an email from John in North Carolina with the subject line "Love the tool, hate the metaphor":

  • Dear Professor Sword,

    I enjoy reading your work and love using the Writer's Diet tool. However, I did want to share my extreme hesitation to use this with my classes. The idea of lean vs. flabby prose promotes a fat-phobic environment. I try to cultivate a place where writers of all sizes feel comfortable, including mentioning in class that the writer's diet is unnecessarily fattist. Have you ever considered updating the image with something more affirming or neutral?

I replied as I usually do, thanking John for taking the time to write and offering a few comments and suggestions:

  1. The phrase "flabby or fit" is meant to refer to muscles, not to body types, and the overall message is a positive, health-focused one: If you want to develop strong muscles, it's best to eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly; likewise, if you want to develop strong sentences, you need build them up with good, nutritious words (not empty calories/clutter) and put them through a vigorous workout.

  2. If, despite this explanation, you and your students still disapprove of the Diet and Fitness metaphor, you can use the blue Settings wheel to change the theme: for example, to Clear Skies ("cloudy or clear?"), Solid Ground ("swampy or solid?"), or Clean House ("cluttered or clear"?).  

  3. Ideally, the online Writer's Diet test should be used as a supplement to the book, not as a stand-alone tool.  At the very least, I would encourage you and your students to spend some time reading my free online User Guide, which explains the key principles behind the test and offers lots of handy hints for getting the most from the tool.

  4. Members of my WriteSPACE virtual writing community get access to a premium version of the Writer's Diet test that produces a customized Action Plan for every sample submitted -- using their preferred theme, of course!  You can try out the Writer's Diet Plus tool by using the discount code WRITERSDIET to get your first month of membership for free.  

But John's question got me thinking. What other metaphors for writing and editing do writers frequently employ, and which of these, like the Writer's Diet, might be open to ontological critique?  

  • Cognitive load:  If you attended my WriteSPACE Special Event last week with psycholinguist Steven Pinker, you'll have heard us talk about cognitive load, a phrase used by psychologists to describe the amount of working memory required by the brain to complete a given task. Long, difficult sentences -- those filled with abstract language, disciplinary jargon, parenthetical phrases, subordinate clauses, and the like -- place a heavy cognitive load on our readers, thereby sapping their mental energy and reducing their comprehension. 

  • Left-branching vs. right-branching sentences:  In an illuminating blog post titled How to Write a More Compelling Sentence, Inger Mewburn (aka the Thesis Whisperer) explains the difference between what linguists call "right-branching" versus "left-branching" sentences: right-branchers start with a subject-verb-object cluster and then add supplementary information, whereas left-branchers pile on all the extras before we even know what the sentence is about. Steven Pinker offers this example of a left-branching sentence, the subject of which, policymakers, does not appear until more than halfway through: "Because most existing studies have examined only a single stage of the supply chain, for example, productivity at the farm, or efficiency of agricultural markets, in isolation from the rest of the supply chain, policymakers have been unable to assess how problems identified at a single stage of the supply chain compare and interact with problems in the rest of the supply chain."  (Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century). 

  • The Lard Factor: In his book Revising Prose, Richard Lanham encourages writers to calculate the Lard Factor of an edited piece of prose by subtracting the number of words in the edited sentence from the number of words in the original, then dividing the difference by the original.  For example, if we were to trim the 63-word behemoth quoted above down to 43 words, the Lard Factor (or percentage of excess words eliminated) would be 32%. 

Viewed through a certain kind of critical lens, all of these metaphors are problematic. Cognitive load suggests that light is good, heavy is bad.  The branching sentences metaphor depicts right as good and left as bad (a sinister sign of an implicit bias against left-handed people?) Lanham's Lard Factor exercise labels lean as good and fatty as bad (another "fattist" metaphor?) 

Yet each of these metaphors also reflects a physical reality.  Heavy loads are harder to lift than light ones; the English-speaking brain favors sentences that read, like words on the page, from left to right; lean meat is healthier to eat than fatty meat (unless you're a vegetarian, in which case you probably find the entire Lard Factor metaphor deeply unappealing).

Metaphors can shape us or empower us, lift us up or let us down.  Arthur Quiller-Couch infamously urged writers to murder your darlings -- that is, to commit infanticide against your most cherished sentences.  But we don't need to succumb to that kind of self-punitive advice; nor should we confuse a healthy diet of well-chosen words with an anxiety-inducing starvation diet.  Editing can be a joyful act, with affirmational metaphors to match.

That woman about to be crushed by weighty words?  Take another look.  Maybe that falling boulder is a beachball filled with air, and she's playing beach volleyball!    


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Writing, Writing Everywhere
 
a typewriter on a bench in a field
 
 

Greetings from Sydney, Australia -- the first time I've travelled overseas since late 2019.  It feels amazing (and strange) to have my wings on again! 

Back in early 2020, I had recently returned home from travels to South America and all around the South Pacific, and I had upcoming trips planned to North America, Australia, and Europe -- journeys that never came to pass.  Instead, along with hundreds of millions of people worldwide, I found myself locked down out at home, facing an uncertain future and wondering how to go on writing.  

In early April 2020, I invited fellow writers from across the globe to contribute to an online gallery called "Writing in the Time of Covid-19."  You sent me photographs of your computer desks and garden tables, your coffee mugs and keyboard-hogging cats, your wide yet narrow views to the outside world. 

Wendi (USA) included a child and a dog in her photo: "Writing during COVID-19 means I have more company in my writing space."  Juliet (Australia) set herself up to read next to her husband's grave: "Very peaceful and easy to maintain distance from (living) people."  Ineke (UK) improvised an ingenious writing desk constructed from her boyfriend's ironing board.  

Now it's time for a follow-up exhibit: "Writing, Writing Everywhere"! 

Please send me your photos of where you're writing now: the cafe tables, garden benches, and mountaintops where you couldn't go to write at the height of the pandemic two years ago.  

The submission portal will close on May 31. After that, I'll launch our new Writing, Writing Everywhere gallery with an invitation for you to visit online and vote for your favorite photo and caption.

The winner will receive a signed copy of my book Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (which contains a whole chapter about writing spaces). That's right: I'll send you a hardback, slip-covered, snail-mailed copy of a real book that you can carry with you wherever you go to write.

Here's my submission to the Writing, Writing Everywhere gallery: a photo of the spot where I drafted this post. I can't wait to see yours!


Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.