You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Several years ago, a researcher at Stanford conducted a study in which she asked people to tap out rhythms to songs that they had in their heads,

and other people were supposed to guess what the songs were.

Like, for example, I have a song in my head. Try to guess what it is.

It sounds like a clap that they do at baseball games?

No, no. What is it? No, that's somewhere over the rainbow. Oh, really? Yeah.

Okay.

What are I missing here?

What's going on here is what we call the curse of knowledge in that I have the whole thing in my head, but you're not hearing it at all.

And in fact, that's what happened in this study.

People guess only 3% of 120 or so songs that people were tapping out. And I was thinking

about this recently as I was reading the fabulous new book called The Sense of Style by Stephen Pinker.

He's the psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist who often writes about language.

And he has this fantastic chapter in the book where he talks about the fact that the main cause of incomprehensible prose is that kind of curse.

It's the difficulty of imagining what the reader is taking in.

So what I've heard is that this book is probably the new Strunken White.

Yes.

Even if you have differences of opinion about his various style and grammar rules that he's talking about,

in general, his argument for writing well and clearly is so perfectly explained that this is a great tool

for any beginning or even well-established writer to kind of feel supported, feel the impetus,

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