Brain boffin's guidelines for writing

[Hypoxia]

Okay, the actual title is Here Are Cognitive Scientist Stephen Pinker's 13 Tips For Better Writing and here they are.

1. Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why?
2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.
3. Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like “approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency,” and “variable.”
4. Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appearance.”
5. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.
6. Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).
7. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).
8. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.
9. Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.
10. Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use “that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless,” or “despite.”
11. Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.
12. Read it aloud.
13. Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus.

Most of those sound good to me although #3 is a bit murky. Discuss amongst ourselves, as we do regularly with the latest set of authors' guidelines.

 

[NotWise]

Most of those sound good to me although #3 is a bit murky. Discuss amongst ourselves, as we do regularly with the latest set of authors' guidelines.

He seems to be talking more about technical writing than about fiction writing. Number 3 is obscure, especially in the context of fiction. In technical writing, the terms he cites are used and sometimes abused to express or organize ideas about ideas.

 

[MelissaBaby]

[*] Read it aloud.

Always, always, always.

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

I have writers block and this list is helping me work through my frustrations. Thanks!

 

[Handley_Page]

'Fraid I don't understand [3] What's 'meta' ?

I think [10] should see 'coherent', not cohere.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Always, always, always.

Interesting. I've never once read my stories out loud. Well, one of them once, for a recording that was rubbish. My cadence is in my head, as I read and as I write.

 

[Hypoxia]

'Fraid I don't understand [3] What's 'meta' ?

Meta=beyond. In this case, beyond meaning. Yikes.

I think [10] should see 'coherent', not cohere.

Verb (stick together), not adjective (stuck together). "Prose must cohere" is simpler and more direct than "prose must be coherent." Poetry and lyrics can be incoherent. Criticism often uncoheres. Yikes.

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

'Fraid I don't understand [3] What's 'meta' ?

I think [10] should see 'coherent', not cohere.

Cohere’s grammatically correct (prose should stick together.)

 

[ElectricBlue]

'Fraid I don't understand [3] What's 'meta' ?

I think [10] should see 'coherent', not cohere.

Cohere is the verb, coherent the adjective.

Meta (from the Greek meta- μετά- meaning "after" or "beyond") is a prefix used in English to indicate a concept which is an abstraction behind another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. (Wikipedia)

EDIT: three near simultaneous posts.
Notes for non-fiction or technical/scientific writing, I'd say.

 

[NotWise]

Interesting. I've never once read my stories out loud. Well, one of them once, for a recording that was rubbish. My cadence is in my head, as I read and as I write.

Give it a try. Aside from being a way to find goofy mistakes, it also gives you a sense for the flow of the words, ideas, images.

 

[Hypoxia]

Give it a try. Aside from being a way to find goofy mistakes, it also gives you a sense for the flow of the words, ideas, images.

For fun, run it through a vocoder, see how a digital voice sounds it.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Give it a try. Aside from being a way to find goofy mistakes, it also gives you a sense for the flow of the words, ideas, images.

Exactly. And I have caught unintended rhymes and repetitious use of words that I did not notice in even careful silent readings.

It's especially useful in crafting realistic dialogue.

 

[MelissaBaby]

For fun, run it through a vocoder, see how a digital voice sounds it.

Or read it in a funny accent. (well, I do that anyway...)

 

[SimonDoom]

I think what he means by "don't go meta" is "avoid abstraction." This is a problem for non-fiction more than for fiction, and Pinker writes non-fiction. Abstraction is a plague in much academic writing.

As far as fiction is concerned, 3, I think, merges with into 2. Be concrete. Use verbs that say exactly what is happening, and use nouns that conjure things you can picture in your head rather than abstractions.

His use of the word "cohere" is an example of his number 4: use a verb rather than a longer phrase. "Cohere" is better than "be made coherent." To the maximum extent possible, let your verbs do the heavy lifting.

 

[Hypoxia]

[*] Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.

This one bites me. I may pedantically teach how old vs modern steam engines work, or I can just say, "It's a silent steamer." I may throw out bits of geography and assume anyone interested can look at a map. I may rant about early photography or phrenology or steganography. That's my privilege.

But how much detail is enough, and how much overwhelms? Especially in short stories. Novelists may meander endlessly in their immense verbal caverns (bats flying about) on exactly which what goes where and when, and again. We can't really do that with short strokers. So only say what's needed to form an image.

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

This one bites me. I may pedantically teach how old vs modern steam engines work, or I can just say, "It's a silent steamer." I may throw out bits of geography and assume anyone interested can look at a map. I may rant about early photography or phrenology or steganography. That's my privilege.

But how much detail is enough, and how much overwhelms? Especially in short stories. Novelists may meander endlessly in their immense verbal caverns (bats flying about) on exactly which what goes where and when, and again. We can't really do that with short strokers. So only say what's needed to form an image.

Isn’t that Einstein? “Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler”

 

[ElectricBlue]

For fun, run it through a vocoder, see how a digital voice sounds it.

I've done that a few times - it's terrible, coz the pace is absolutely constant, robotic. It renders the whole thing so very, very flat. It's something I just don't need to do - I hear the cadence in my head as I read. As I say, interesting; but for me, unnecessary.

 

[NotWise]

This one bites me. I may pedantically teach how old vs modern steam engines work, or I can just say, "It's a silent steamer." I may throw out bits of geography and assume anyone interested can look at a map. I may rant about early photography or phrenology or steganography. That's my privilege.

But how much detail is enough, and how much overwhelms? Especially in short stories. Novelists may meander endlessly in their immense verbal caverns (bats flying about) on exactly which what goes where and when, and again. We can't really do that with short strokers. So only say what's needed to form an image.

I don't think this is so much a problem of when and how much, as it the problem of realizing when your readers are going to be baffled by something you take for granted.

I'm probably struggling a little bit with that for my "One Night" story.

 

[Blind_Justice]

Always, always, always.

Absolutely. Makes stuff flow better.

 

[yukonnights]

For fun, run it through a vocoder, see how a digital voice sounds it.

I've done that because I have it and it's easy...the hard part is getting it shut down so I can fix the stupid typo/mistake...then cycling the thing back up again. But, the Voice-bot also showed me that when I proof-read myself, I should try to alter the natural cadence of my voice. It seems to make it easier to hear the off word usage...why the people sitting next to me at the diner kept staring and snickering, I never did figure them out

 

[yukonnights]

Most of those sound good to me although #3 is a bit murky. Discuss amongst ourselves, as we do regularly with the latest set of authors' guidelines.

He seems to be talking more about technical writing than about fiction writing. Number 3 is obscure, especially in the context of fiction. In technical writing, the terms he cites are used and sometimes abused to express or organize ideas about ideas.

I looked this up earlier today. Here's what the on-board Mac dictionary has that seems relevant; meta adjective (of a creative work) referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.

I have to admit, I don't understand #3 any better than I did before. Okay; how does my creative work refer to itself? How does it refer to the conventions of the genre?

 

[NotWise]

I have to admit, I don't understand #3 any better than I did before. Okay; how does my creative work refer to itself? How does it refer to the conventions of the genre?

I don't think #3 has any relevance to fiction writing. Unless you're a technical writer, you can just ignore it. Even for technical work, it isn't very clearly stated.

We often hear of "metadata" in technical work. That's data about data. You might have a "properties" or "about" button on your word processor that tells you things like when the document was created, when it was last edited, how long it is, who owns it, and so on. Those are metadata -- they're data about data.

I think #3 is talking about using higher-level constructs -- ideas about other ideas -- instead of using direct references to the available data.

The words he referenced where:

approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency, and variable.

It's hard to make sense out of this pile of words, but they all seem to be descriptions of ideas, rather than being ideas. I don't know how one is supposed to avoid them. For instance, if an idea is an assumption, then it seems like it should be described as such.

I don't necessarily disagree with him. I think his idea needed more than a one-line explanation.

 

[Hypoxia]

It's hard to make sense out of this pile of words, but they all seem to be descriptions of ideas, rather than being ideas. I don't know how one is supposed to avoid them. For instance, if an idea is an assumption, then it seems like it should be described as such.

I don't necessarily disagree with him. I think his idea needed more than a one-line explanation.

Perhaps, as a Cognitive Scientist, Dr Pinker violated his Rule #5: "Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it." He assumes we know 'meta'. Tsk.