Steven Pinker on Good Writing, with Ian McEwan

Intelligence Squared

Arts, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2017

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Steven Pinker is one of the world’s leading authorities on language, mind and human nature. A professor of psychology at Harvard, he is the bestselling author of eight books and regularly appears in lists of the world’s top 100 thinkers. In 2014 he returned to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss his latest publication 'The Sense of Style', a short and entertaining writing guide for the 21st century. Pinker argued that bad writing can’t be blamed on the internet, or on “the kids today”. Good writing has always been hard: a performance requiring pretence, empathy, and a drive for coherence. He answered questions such as: how can we overcome the “curse of knowledge”, the difficulty in imagining what it’s like not to know something we do? And how can we distinguish the myths and superstitions about language from helpful rules that enhance clarity and grace? Pinker showed how everyone can improve their mastery of writing and their appreciation of the art. Professor Pinker was in conversation with Ian McEwan, one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, who has frequently explored the common ground between art and science. This event took place on the 25th September 2014 at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The original producer was Executive Producer Hannah Kaye, with editing by Executive Producer Rowan Slaney and Daisy Moll. Producer Catharine Hughes was your host. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be about. Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to [email protected] or Tweet us at @intelligence2. At Intelligence Squared we’ve got our own online streaming platform, Intelligence Squared+ and we’d love you to give it a go. It’s packed with more than 20 years’ worth of video debates and conversations on the world’s most important topics as well as exclusive podcast content. Tune in to live events, ask your questions or watch on-demand, totally ad-free with hours of discussion to dive into. Visit intelligencesquaredplus.com to start watching today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:00.0	Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to decipher a legal contract or to follow an academic article or to understand the instructions for setting up a wireless home network. Now there's no shortage
1:15.4	of hypotheses and the most popular is that bad writing is a deliberate choice, that bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy,
1:27.0	that academics in the I've never found this argument particularly compelling because I just know too many
1:46.4	Scientists and other scholars who are have a great deal to say who have no desire to impress, no need to obfuscate, still their writing stinks.
1:59.1	The other hypothesis that suggested to me is that it's digital media that are ruining the language.
2:05.0	That Google is making us stupid, that Twitter is forcing us to think in 140 characters.
2:11.0	Now, according to this hypothesis hypothesis it must have been much better before the advent of digital media and those of you who are old enough will remember that age in the 1980s when bureaucrats wrote in plain prose, teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs
2:30.1	and every academic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay.
2:34.0	You remember those days, don't you, in the 1980s?
2:37.0	Or was it the 1970s?
2:39.0	The thing is, of course, that bad writing has always been with us and one can see almost identical complaints about the quality of writing and the imminent decline of the language in every decade and every century, literally going back to the invention of the printing press.
	...

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