Shadowing Practice: Harvard Professor Explains The Rules of Writing (Steven Pinker Interview) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I'm here at Harvard in the office of Steven Pinker.
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And he's written nine books and devoted his life to studying language and cognition and writing.
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And so what we did in this interview is we started off with the really practical stuff.
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We started off with his rules for writing.
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And what makes him unique is that he's been thinking about AI since the 1980s.
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So if you're interested in doing great nonfiction writing in the age of LLMs, well, this interview is for you.
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I want to talk about The Curse of Knowledge
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and I want to talk about this this cartoon from your book
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which says good start needs more gibberish yes
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when I pose the question why is there
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so much bad writing why is there so much academies
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and bureaucraties and corporates people's favorite answer is captured by
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that cartoon namely that bad writing is a deliberate choice
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that it's in various versions it's academics with nothing to say
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dress up banal ideas with gobbledygook to show how sophisticated they are
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or pasty -faced nerds get revenge on the girls who turned
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them down for dates in high school mm -hmm people want to erect a kind of cult
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that no one else outsiders can't penetrate
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because they haven't learned the jargon I don't think that's the
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best explanation for bad writing partly it's personal I just know
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enough people who have plenty to say they're brilliant people they
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have no desire to obfuscate they're just uh incompetent they just
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don't know how to express themselves clearly there's something called hanlon's razor never attribute to malice
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that which can adequately be explained by stupidity yeah and uh
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that isn't these are not stupid people i'm talking about
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but it's a kind of stupidity in not knowing where your audience is coming from.
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And I illustrate it with an anecdote of a conference in technology, entertainment, and design, better known by its acronym,
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TED, where a brilliant molecular biologist had been invited to present his latest findings.
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He launched into what was obvious to me is the exact kind of talk
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that he would give to his peers in molecular biology.
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And that within about four seconds, he had lost everyone because he just spoke in jargon without even introducing what problem he was solving,
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why it was significant.
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It was launched right into the experiments.
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There was a room of several hundred people from many walks of life, from entertainment, from design.
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And it was obvious to everyone in the room that no one was understanding a word, obvious to everyone except the distinguished biologist, who was just clueless.
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Now, this is, you know, not a stupid man, but he was very stupid when it came to communication.
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Namely, not everyone knows what you know.
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Now, the curse of knowledge, a term from economics, is
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the difficulty that we all have in knowing what it's like not to know something that we know.
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That is to subtract something from your brain, put yourself in the shoes of your audience,
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whether it be in public speaking or in writing, figure out where are they coming from.
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What do they know?
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What don't they know?
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I think that's the main cause of bad writing.
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You get abbreviations and acronyms that no one has any way of knowing.
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You have jargon
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that is known only to a tiny little clique you have
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abstractions the level of the stimulus was proportional to the intensity of the reaction
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and what it really means is
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that people kids look longer at a bunny than a truck
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so that is it it's so familiar to you
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that you don't think it's worth explaining to people concretely what they're supposed to be seen right
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so all of these are manifestations of the curse of knowledge goes by other names
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egocentrism absence of a theory of mind that is a theory of what's going on in other people's minds
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and i if i had to identify the the single biggest flaw in writing
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and communication it would be that that's it so
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when you're writing your books i know you go up to
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cape con you write for like you know as long as you possibly can now i would assume
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that one way to get around the curse of knowledge is
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just to talk to the kinds of people who would be reading your book yeah you show it to people
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so what do you do what do you do
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because you you know you write really intensely so
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when you're writing how do you get around that well I do something
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that is I know is not good enough
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but I do it as best I can
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which is I try to imagine what it's like for someone not to know what I know
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that is I try to cultivate my sense of empathy
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but the problem with the curse of knowledge is you don't know
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when you're subject to the curse of knowledge because something that seems.
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So obvious to you that you don't even question whether other people know it turns out not to be obvious.
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So anyway, I try but at the end of the day, I show it to people.
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When my mother was alive, I would always show her a draft of my book.
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Not for the reason that most academics cite,
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namely referring to my mother as the epitome of a unsophisticated,
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not very well -read, not very bright person.
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My mother was extremely intelligent, extremely well -read, and very sophisticated, but she wasn't a cognitive psychologist.
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She wasn't a psycholinguist.
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She didn't know what I knew.
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And when I write, I don't write for a random sample of the population.
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They don't buy my books.
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I write for people who are intellectually curious, who have some degree of education.
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However, not for peers in my field.
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And so, my mother being an example, but also, of course, when you publish for a commercial publisher, you have an editor, and the editor is typically very smart,
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but again, not in your field.
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And I show it to people in different fields who are academics,
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but it's surprising how insular even academics are when it comes to other academics.
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Sometimes there'll be people here in this building in my own department, sometimes my own subdivision within my own department,
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like students, and they'll give me their thesis proposal, and I just don't know what they're talking about.
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Sometimes in my own field, because they've been immersed in like five or six people in their lab, their supervisor and the other grad students,
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a couple of postdocs and a research assistant, and they've all been consuming the same jargon that as soon as they step outside that tiny little circle, they're unintelligible.
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Yeah.
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So even showing it to, if I'm showing it to a friend who's, you know, an economist or a historian or a political scientist or an evolutionary biologist,
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not being a cognitive psychologist, they'll say, I'm sorry about it.
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I just don't know what you're talking about.
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Yeah.
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In terms of your writing, you've done so much work looking at vision and how the brain works.
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And it seems like a lot of your writing advice is informed by
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that like i guess
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if i were to try to summarize it it's like a lot of our brain
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and basically the way that we move through the world is indexed heavily on vision
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and so writing well means being concrete
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and helping people see what it is they're trying to write is
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that a good way of describing it yes and
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that would be my
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that probably the second bit of second advice on the list
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okay first one being find some way of getting into get into your reader's heads
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but don't just depend on your ability to get their heads actually get a flesh
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and blood person to actually read it and see if it makes any sense to them.
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So that'd be number one.
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Number two is, you know, I study language and, you know, as a writer, I live in language,
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but language is kind of overrated in the sense that what understanding consists of is not a bunch of words.
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It's not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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But language is a means to an end of getting people to appreciate what the ideas you're trying to convey, which are not just a string of verbiage,
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and those ideas very often are visual, you know, and motoric, that is,
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you know, bodily, emotional, auditory, but they're sensory.
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Or they're even conceptual, but they aren't just a bunch of vowels and consonants. And
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so constantly allowing your reader to be able to form a
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mental image based on what you're writing is the next key to good writing.
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That is, don't talk about a stimulus if you mean a bunny rabbit.
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don't talk about a level or a perspective or a framework or a paradigm or a concept all of which
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mean a lot to you in your day -to -day work
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but no one can form an image of a paradigm in their mind's eye
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so how do you do that like one thing
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that you've said is use for example all the time what else can we do
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so often you know visual metaphors are helpful one of the reasons
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that often the prose of other eras strikes us as
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so much more vivid it's gonna say lush lush yes partly because they had the advantage of
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writing before there were you know several hundred years of academia
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and intellectuals inventing terms and abstractions and they had to appeal to
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images that were part of people's common knowledge
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so instead of saying something like aggression
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or antisocial behavior they might say the spirit of the of
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the hawk needed into our flesh yes you know we wouldn't write like
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that because we can say you know aggression or antisocial behavior
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but and that's jargon that a lot of people are familiar with but they weren't always with us.
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And before that, there had to be some way of referring to it in terms of an image that everyone shared.
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And I think that's why often the writing of previous centuries just strikes us as so much more gripping,
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so much more evocative and powerful that they had to appeal to visual metaphors.
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Yeah, I've never thought about that before because a lot of the Bible's like that.
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I think of like, I don't know why the owl of Minerva came to mind.
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There's just all of this symbolism in animals.
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It always is striking.
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And so what you're saying is like a lot of the concepts that academics and people brought in, obviously, they're kind of a more efficient way to communicate,
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but they do lack that kind of visual quality that makes writing vivid.
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That's right.
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So they do make it, in fact, they're essential for doing the work within the profession.
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You have to be able, if you're a biologist,
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you have to be able to talk about things like ecosystems and species and systems and reagents and potentiation,
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all these concepts that you don't want to have to go back to basics and talk about, well, there's a certain amount of chemicals and we call that a concentration.
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And when it increases over time, we call it, you know, you're beyond that after you're a freshman.
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And so you have more and more abstract terms that you could refer to, enormous bodies of knowledge just with like two syllables.
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That's very good.
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Right.
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The problem is that then now
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when it's time to convey them to someone who isn't at the pinnacle of specialization in your field, because of the curse of knowledge,
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you're apt to forget that these abstractions, which are kind of basic to you or just don't even need to be defined, aren't basic to anyone else.
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What do we need to know about writers about how hard writing is?
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And I mean it in this way.
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Speaking comes so naturally to us, but then writing is something that we sort of have to learn, right?
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You watch a kid and you talk to a parent who has a 20 -month -old.
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They're like, yeah, you know, they're speaking now.
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They're like, oh, you know, you wouldn't believe it.
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You know, they're talking so much.
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They're crawling around.
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And it's always like, yeah, it's like that.
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And then you talk to them who have parents who have an 8 -year -old kid.
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It's like, how's the writing going?
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It's like, well, you know, it's going a little slow.
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There's not that same excitement.
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And so it's as if, like, why is it that writing is so unnatural in a way that speaking is so natural?
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Like, what is going on there scientifically and then practically?
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A number of things.
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One of them is that in conversation,
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you never have two people that are parachuted on a stage and immediately have to begin a conversation.
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They have some common ground to begin with.
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They know why they're there.
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They're talking about something that is in the air
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that they're both familiar with was the reason for them having the conversation in the first place.
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They can get away with using terms
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that in context are perfectly clear like this and that and the thing and what I was talking about and she.
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Whereas if you are not privy to that little social circle, you may not know who they're referring to.
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In writing, you're wrenched from the context.
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Someone's picking a book up off the shelf, and they've never met you, and they may be living in a different country,
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you might be dead, they've got to pick up all of this detail from what's there on the page,
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not what's in, not the common ground that the two people bring to the conversation.
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Also, you know the, when you're speaking, you know that you're speaking to someone,
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you know their idiosyncrasies you're a little bit better at avoiding the curse of knowledge partly
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because you get feedback right the furrowed brow the quizzical expression
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the uh the what the request for clarification i'm sorry i
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just don't know what you're talking about uh in real time
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and you know in the body language the engagement uh even in in a live audience uh any speaker knows
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when people are starting to fidget and drift off as opposed to continuing to be riveted.
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None of that is available in writing.
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Absolutely.
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How about this one?
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I think generalizations without examples and examples without generalizations are both useless.
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Yes.
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Well, useless might be a bit strong, but generalizations without examples, I find even in my field nine out of ten times
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I just don't know what they're talking about it's like what
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do you like like give me an example just it's too
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because a generalization erases detail it sweeps over particulars you often just can't really know what it's referring to
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and and and the abstract words in a language just aren't precise enough,
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they often have, we have probably a hundred concepts for every word in the English language.
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And so a particular word, especially if it's abstract, won't call to mind a particular referent.
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The example pins it down to what's the general ballpark that you're talking about?
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What is the generalization of generalization about?
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Now, examples of generalizations, it's, well, why did you just tell me that?
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Like, you know, and your point is, uh, and that apropos of what?
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One of my favorite ways to think about this is that there's always a trade -off between context and compression.
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So if I could wax poetic for the next five hours about my train ride to Boston today,
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but that's way too long.
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Or I could tell you, yeah, it was an easy train ride, but then you didn't actually get anything from that because there's no context there.
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And that maybe we're always kind of balancing the examples, kind of give us that context, and then the generalizations are the compression,
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and it's actually in like the swing and the dance of the two of those that good writing and good communication happens.
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Yeah, so for example, if I were to say that familiar words don't have to refer to the literal meaning of their parts,
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you can understand that, and you kind of say, well, yeah, yeah, okay, and then I say, well, for example, a bathroom isn't necessarily a room with a bath.
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And going to the bathroom doesn't necessarily mean going to a room that has a bathroom.
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Breakfast isn't necessarily breaking a fast.
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And Christmas doesn't necessarily refer to Christ's mass.
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Now, having said that, I think you now understand what I mean
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when I said
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that the meaning of a familiar phrase doesn't necessarily correspond to the meanings of its parts hopefully
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that now makes some sense to you now
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that i've given you the examples without the examples you know you could nod
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and say oh that sounds plausible
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but you really wouldn't have understood it let's roll with that if adults commit adultery do infants commit infantry
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if olive oil is made from olives what do they make baby oil from
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if a vegetarian eats vegetables what is a humanitarian consume a writer is someone who writes
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and a stinger is something that stings
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but fingers don't fing grocers don't gross hammers don't ham humdingers don't humding ushers don't ush and haberdashers don't haberdash
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what's going on there why'd you pull this out
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so this is a quote from Richard letterer I deserve no credit for
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that that criticism and I love this I think it's
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so good letterer has written a number of delightful books like crazy English and anguished English.
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He has a marvelous ear and a fabulous collector of quirks and errors and oddities and blunders in the English language.
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So that whimsical list is quite profound because it indicates a lot of truths about language,
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such as that over time,
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compositions of words, compounds or words with a prefix and suffix can sometimes drift away from the original meaning.
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The case of adultery, for example, it is related to adulterate.
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Namely, to commit adultery is to introduce a foreign substance,
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namely semen into a woman where it doesn't belong.
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But that whole connection has been completely lost.
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Also, in many kinds of compounds, there are a number of different semantic relationships that can hold.
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So for example, olive oil is oil made out of olives.
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Baby oil is oil for babies hmm
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so there isn't a logical a single logical relationship between the different parts of the the compound language is
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so ancient English itself is depending on how you count maybe you know 1500 years old
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or more but it came from Germanic which came from Indo -European and who knows where that came from,
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that a lot of words can completely obscure their origin.
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You have to go to a dictionary to find them out, but they're kind of like fossils of processes in the language that are long dead.
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How the ER got into finger, I would have to look up the etymology to tell you, but it's not the same as a sing -singer, which comes from the rule
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that ER turns a verb into a noun for the kind of person that typically engages in that activity,
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that's a rule that's still alive and well in the English language, whereas we have the fossil record of lots of rules that died long ago.
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Hmm.
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When you're writing, like if I were to basically map out almost like a gradient of our conversation, I'd say like curse of knowledge, I would almost, I'm being very haphazard here.
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I'd say like equal parts left brain, right brain.
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And then we sort of moved into kind of a left brain side of the conversation.
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And then I think of what you've said about language should be a source of pleasure.
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Like I think of that in beauty, right?
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You talk a lot about beauty also in your photography.
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You're very interested in that.
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That to me is more right brain.
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So, like, when you're writing, when you're actually sitting down at the keyboard, what are some of the more right -brained, maybe less verbal concepts that drive your writing?
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Well, certainly visual imagery.
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That is, can I form an image?
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Can my reader form an image?
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Euphony, that is sound.
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That is, is there some poetry in the prose?
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and I read aloud or at least mumble, or at least mumble to myself, my prose, something that's, again, a highly recommended writing tip.
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I didn't invent it.
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Often when you read a draft of your own prose, and if you can't articulate it smoothly,
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that probably your reader won't be mentally sounding it out smoothly either.
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The aesthetics sometimes come from even things like paying attention to the metrical structure of language, that is the rhythm.
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Oh, tell me about that.
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There is a regular rhythm to language in that it's not perfectly, you know, tick -tock, tick -tock like a metronome,
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but there are beats, and if you disrupt it too much, then it does interfere with speech, but it also interferes with reading,
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even though it's just characters on a page.
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Even the aesthetics of sibilant sounds.
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Generally, too many ch's and s's make prose a little unpleasant,
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and I will often pick a synonym that avoids the sibilant, at least too many sibilants in a row.
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I'll often go with alliteration just because,
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again, there's a little spark of pleasure sense of style sense of style yep even
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when it is you don't want to make it too
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conspicuous otherwise it starts to feel forced
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but often a bit of alliteration can just make the sentence roll past more easily why do you think
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that you as much as anybody have been the person to kind of stomp your feet kick
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and scream about the how bad academic writing has been over the years like
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when i think of who has been like guys what are
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what are we doing yeah you've sort of been one of
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the four the front runners what about it i mean besides the obvious what about it's just bothered you
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so so vividly yeah part of it is um just the sheer waste
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that is there's an awful lot of really brilliant work a
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lot of really smart people you know in in academia
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and you know why are they doing it just to um you know entertain each other and you know close little circle.
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I mean, taxpayers pay for it.
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It should be accessible.
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They should give it away.
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They should state it in a form that it's accessible.
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There's also, even within the profession,
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there's just an enormous amount of wasted effort and potential for misunderstanding in bad prose.
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It's like, if I'm reading, if I have to read something, it's a student paper, or it's a paper in my own field
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or i'm reviewing a grant proposal or peer reviewing a manuscript
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or evaluating for someone for tenure
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if i have to read the same paragraph like five
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or six times in order to know what they're talking about
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for one thing i might get it wrong then what you
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know what's the point another is why should i have to read it five
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or six times i'd rather be you're doing something else
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and come on yeah uh so there there's waste there's confusion uh there's also also foregone opportunity for pleasure and beauty.
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It's enjoyable to read something that's well crafted and it's annoying to read something that's stilted and turgid and bloated.
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There are many reasons and it does get under my skin
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when academics devote so much brain power into the scholarship
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and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done.
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Yeah, it's a true virus in the modern world.
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Yeah.
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I take a particular interest in it, not just because I do try very hard, even in my academic writing,
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to be clear, but since I'm someone who actually not just studies stuff as an academic,
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but studies language, I get particularly annoyed at people in the field of linguistics and psycholinguistics, because so many of them are such bad writers.
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It's like you study language.
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If what you're studying is what makes a sentence difficult to understand, why don't you pay attention to your own research and make your sentences less hard to understand?
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Yeah.
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What is it that you love so much about children's explanations?
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Things like clouds are water vapor, smoke is fire vapor.
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Oh, yes.
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You do see things.
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Yes, that was from my grandson.
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I mean, it's poetry.
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It's a new juxtaposition.
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There's such a freshness to children's explanations.
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Yeah, yeah, because they are writing in cliches, and partly because they haven't accumulated this mass of abstractions,
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like the writers of a few centuries ago, who had to grasp for some common image,
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children, without the decades of acquired jargon from academia,
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have to appeal to something that they can see and that other people can see.
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Yeah.
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There's a guy who I follow on Twitter who I've really come to like.
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And in his bio, it says, listen to children.
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They haven't forgotten how to see.
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And I know a YouTuber, and one of the ways
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that she comes up with her ideas is she has conversations with her friend's kids who just ask these crazy questions, like how deep is the ocean?
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How high would a tower need to be in order for us to get to heaven
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and then like i have another friend who
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when he was a kid he thought
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that clouds were produced by those little smoke things uh sort of like chimneys
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so he thought that those were like cloud creators oh
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and there's such a freshness to just how children see
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and how they talk about things
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and like you said they're there they can't possibly think inside the box
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because they don't even know the box exists yes right
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and there were there there there are have been in history various features to remind people of the originality
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and the freshness of kids there was a regular feature from
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my childhood called kids say the darndest things from a television
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host named art art linkletter long yeah i've heard of him
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oh you have okay yeah in fact what has survived him
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and the uh and the feature of the the program is the say the darndest things
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or even the verb the darndest nouns, which you'll often see adopted in headlines,
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and it's become itself a kind of formula, but he originated it.
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Johnny Carson, the long -time host of The Tonight Show,
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would sometimes have features where he'd read kids' answers to questions to much hilarity.
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How does humor factor into all this?
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Into writing?
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Yeah, exactly.
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and even maybe even the science of humor like words
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that are funnier because you have
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that great talk from like 10 years ago where you I'm
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gonna recommend yeah well there's I guess like everything there's an art to it
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because you don't want to wait
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when it's strained you get groans instead of laughter yeah
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so it has to be appropriate it can't just be something
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that has been repeated so often that people have heard it 37 times before right
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and humor specifically depends on freshness yeah it does
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and it also depends humor does have much in common with good writing there's a line from Hamlet
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which a brevity is the soul of wit yeah now it's
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a great saying for a number of reasons one of them
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is even the term soul as opposed to is essential for wit
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or is important for wit or even the essence of wit um those are ways
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that we would say it now
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but the soul of wit you have to think for a minute soul being the the deepest deepest essence
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but it's a monosyllable and it has so much uh uh resonance
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that you know i guess that
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that shakes me really was a good writer wasn't he yeah i've heard
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that guy yeah um but it's also it is uh it is true
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and it's a good example of itself because it is
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so brief it was reiterated centuries later in the famous style manual the elements of style by Strunk
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and white where professor Strunk in lectures at Cornell that E .B.
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White recalled and then turned into a book would say
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that the first rule of writing is omit needless words now again it's a beautiful example of itself
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because there are no needless words in it and he said
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that sometimes professor Strunk would be so adamant and so insistent
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that this was the almost the only thing you need to know about writing
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that he would just not know what to do except repeat it
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and you say omit needless words omit needless words omit needless words
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and you know as with brevity is the soul of wit aside from being an example of itself it is
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so true that But sometimes when I have to...
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uh compress an article to fit into some fixed space especially
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if i'm writing for a newspaper or magazine
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and say you know unlike academia where you can blather on uh with no one telling you to shut up
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when you have to write for a paper they'll say sorry 800 words
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and if it's you know 800 803 words the editor will chop off three words
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and you don't get to say what they are
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and it can often mangle the meaning
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so you have to actually learn how to say something in 800 words
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or however many words it is
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but what i find is often just the exercise of squeezing it into
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that uh that maximum limit just improves the prose as
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if by magic it's like oh you know damn i have to like make this shorter
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and i thought i had said it perfectly then often
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when you do it you find you know it really has improved in quality having gotten rid of those needless words
408
Partly it's because of mental effort.
409
Namely, every syllable, every word is more cognitive processing by your reader.
410
If you can get the same message in quicker, that's often less work.
411
But it also makes it aesthetically more pleasing.
412
You have to work within the constraints of the English language, the melody, the rhythm, the music of the language.
413
It forces you into, often into concrete language instead of woolly idioms and cliches.
414
Brevity is the soul of wit is good.
415
It kind of just hit me how good of a line that is.
416
It's such a good line.
417
I've heard that a thousand times, but it never punched me in the chest like it just did.
418
I got to ask.
419
Sorry, the ways that I brought it up is in humor.
420
Yeah.
421
And it's the soul of wit.
422
I mean, wit used to mean a lot more than just, you know, ha ha you know it meant trenchantness and appropriateness
423
but wit in the sense of just raw humor that's something
424
that comedians know you pair down the jokes you pair down the lines
425
when you're using humor the shorter the pithier the funnier
426
if you drag it out then you know they're funny you ain't funny you can step on your own punchline.
427
You can telegraph the punchline.
428
So I went to Rockefeller Center the other day, and there's this, call it like a big thing of stone, and John D.
429
Rockefeller is talking about his theory of society and the good life.
430
And it was just remarkably well -written, remarkably well -written.
431
And then it's the same thing with the Declaration of Independence.
432
There's just some beautiful lines in that, right?
433
We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.
434
It's just beautiful writing.
435
And what do you make of how old they're writing?
436
It seems like when people think about it, it's like harder to read.
437
Thank God that writing has gotten so much clearer and easier to read.
438
But at the same time, it does feel like a kind of beauty and poetry, a kind of reverence
439
that I have for the language itself has been stripped away
440
from the English language at times you do sometimes feel
441
that even again Rockefeller is a good example
442
because he did not go down in history as a pro stylist no exactly thank you thank you
443
that was a very important part of
444
that point this was the CEO he was an oil magnet yeah right
445
and likewise I have a quote from Thomas Edison in enlightenment now on how the electricity will liberate women right
446
and it's just beautifully written beautifully written
447
and this is a guy who spent you know hours with you know filaments
448
and life light bulbs and he could
449
but he could write like an angel Herbert Spencer Oliver Wendell
450
Holmes senior that's a great example Charles Darwin yeah all these
451
people who are not themselves professional writers they did something else
452
but they were very good at
453
so it's a an interesting question i think one reason is
454
they were trained themselves on the classics on on um great works of literature probably
455
because for many of them there wasn't um the telephone radio uh let alone
456
texting social media um the way that you presented yourself was through your prose
457
And so you cultivated it the same way you kind of arranged yourself in a mirror.
458
This is how other people viewed you.
459
But you had this start because also they were educated on the classics.
460
They had many good examples to draw on.
461
But then the third reason is one that came up earlier in our conversation, namely since they didn't have the benefit of decades
462
and decades of abstractions and cliches
463
and they were kind of exploring virgin territory conveying new ideas and they didn't couldn't easily reach for a canned cliché.
464
They had to put new ideas into forms that their readers or listeners could understand.
465
And that forced them to draw on visual images and metaphors and vivid expressions and locutions.
466
And that is that there's been a process that's been going on for longer than a century called informalization,
467
where you can see it in dress where men no longer wear hats and women don't wear gloves.
468
And sometimes you look at a picture of someone on a hike from a century ago and, you know, the men are wearing ties and the women are wearing long dresses and, you know, they're going hiking.
469
This would be inconceivable to us.
470
The fact that people used to address each other with, you know, Mr. and Mrs. and we're all on a first name basis.
471
I got in trouble in the third grade for calling my teacher.
472
I went to detention for calling my teacher by her first name.
473
And that would not happen now.
474
That's certainly familiar to me from my childhood.
475
It would be unthinkable.
476
I wouldn't have gotten that detention.
477
Actually, it's been like 20 years, and I still feel the shame that I fell in that moment.
478
It's crazy.
479
It just wouldn't have occurred to us.
480
You couldn't have done that in a million years.
481
The fact that taboo language, profanities are commonly woven into speech, which again would have been unthinkable a century ago.
482
But there is a process of greater familiarity, of less hierarchy, partly as a byproduct of democratization,
483
the erosion of traditional hierarchies of class and education.
484
There's a kind of romantic ethos where authenticity,
485
spontaneity are valued as opposed to putting on airs, thinking carefully before you do anything.
486
All of these have led to fancy language being seen as more pompous,
487
stilted, distancing, whereas the cultural value has changed toward spontaneity, intimacy, naturalness, authenticity.
488
So I think many of us, if we had to put the effort into crafting prose the way they may have a century or two centuries ago,
489
we'd feel, oh, people are thinking I'm being too fancy.
490
And you might even perceive you as being too fancy.
491
And as a result, the conversational vernacular has, as opposed to the elevated,
492
the well -crafted, has come to characterize modern prose.
493
So I got to ask, you were talking about being able to pull a cliche or an abstraction.
494
AI takes that completely to the next level.
495
And do you feel like AI then enhances our almost inability to think originally,
496
for lack of a better word?
497
Like, does it keep the trend that we're seeing?
498
Or are LLMs like a new form and then maybe actually create some new way of communicating altogether?
499
Yeah, the output of LLMs is peculiar.
500
In one sense, it's well -written in the sense that it tends not to be in academies,
501
in jargon, in the sentence structure tends to be pretty plain in the sound.
502
Even the progression of ideas tends to be orderly.
503
There tends to be an introductory sentence and concluding sentence.
504
So in that sense, it's good writing.
505
It's bad in the sense that it is so generic and prosaic, and you can almost recognize the output of a large language model it's
506
so been so banal uh now perhaps it'd be trained and perhaps
507
if you prompted it you know don't don't be prosaic don't
508
be uh plain uh it'll be interesting to see whether it
509
would come up with some of uh with any kind of style
510
or or freshness
511
but it's not the way it's designed it's designed as a
512
mash -up as a pastiche of you know literally you know billions of of examples out there.
513
And it's an interesting question why it should be so, at least why it's pro -style should be sound.
514
I mean, I think that's the best you could say about it.
515
Whereas the pro -style of most academics, most lawyers, most bureaucrats is not sound.
516
Why is it better?
517
One possibility is it's just been hammered into shape through the fine -tuning
518
and the feedback
519
that is instead of just regurgitating uh an amalgam of right the reinforcement learning the reinforcement learning
520
and the uh the stuff they don't really talk about much
521
but that might be essential that is they're real human beings who force it to into a five -paragraph essay.
522
Right.
523
The other is that, and this is completely speculative, we know in visual beauty,
524
often a composite is more attractive than the elements that went into the composite.
525
So that if you take a bunch of faces and you morph them together, the non -existent human being that comes out of the morphing is more handsome
526
or prettier than all of the men's faces and women's faces that went into it.
527
Really?
528
Take a high school yearbook and you mash together the several hundred faces, and the result is pretty attractive.
529
Is that right?
530
Yeah.
531
Now, whether that can be true of prose style,
532
that is that if you were to eliminate all of the god -awful convoluted constructions
533
and just came up with a kind of generic sentence structure, it wouldn't be beautiful, but it would be clear.
534
That's a hypothesis.
535
You've written nine books.
536
You're working on your 10th now.
537
With LLMs and the way they're going, if you were to almost rewrite those books starting now, how would you have written those books differently?
538
Knowing what we know about large -time shows?
539
Yeah, knowing what we know about LLMs and also your sense of where the world is going and how it's changing, how the world of writing is changing.
540
Would you have written the same books?
541
Probably not.
542
One, I think I'd have to give greater weight to the power of abstracting patterns from massive amounts of input,
543
which in the approach that I was kind of trained in and that I then developed of computational cognitive science,
544
Chomsky and linguistics, classic AI, was much more organized around rules,
545
algorithms, logic, kind of logical programming.
546
It was hard to imagine how with enough just sheer input
547
and training a neural an associative neural network could extract sensible ideas and prose out of this huge unstructured massive input.
548
Now I don't think that shows that the human
549
And mind is a large language model because it would be the equivalent of a child listening to language for,
550
you know, 30 ,000 years before they could put up their first sentence clearly.
551
And also kids don't just need to have massive amounts of text pour into them.
552
They also are situated in a world where they can figure
553
out what the people talking to them are trying to say
554
and they're interacting with the world
555
and that's a very different style of learning than just processing massive amounts of text
556
but still I think I certainly would have had to reconcile
557
the intelligence of large language models with human intelligence with more
558
attention to the power of pattern extraction from large input corpora that I did well thanks very much for doing this.
559
Thank you.
560
It's been a pleasure.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Harvard Professor Explains The Rules of Writing”. This video has 560 sentences and 6962 words to shadow. The speech runs for 43:28. The speaker talks at a natural 160 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| prose noun | /ˈpɹoʊz/ | Language, particularly written language, not intended as poetry. |
| curse noun | /kɝs/ | A supernatural detriment or hindrance; a bane. |
| refer verb | /ɹɪˈfɜː/ | To direct the attention of (someone toward something). |
| namely adverb | /ˈneɪmli/ | Specifically; that is to say. |
| humour noun | /ˈhjuːmɚ/ | The quality of being amusing, comical, funny. |
| partly adverb | /ˈpɑɹtli/ | In part, or to some degree, but not completely. |
| needless adjective | /ˈniːdləs/ | Not needed; unnecessary. |
| necessarily adverb | /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/ | Inevitably; of necessity. |
| reader noun | /ˈɹi.dɚ/ | A person who reads. |
| whereas | /(h)wɛɹˈæz/ | In contrast; whilst on the contrary; although. |
| input noun | /ˈɪnpʊt/ | The act or process of putting in; infusion. |
| cognitive adjective | /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ | Relating to the part of mental functions that deals with logic, as opposed to affective which deals with emotions. |
| olive noun | /ˈɑ.lɪv/ | A tree of species Olea europaea cultivated since ancient times in the Mediterranean for its fruit and the oil obtained from it. |
| academia noun | /ˌæk.əˈdi.mi.ə/ | The scientific and cultural community engaged in higher education and research, taken as a whole. |
| cloud noun | /ˈklaʊ̯d/ | A visible mass of water droplets suspended in the air. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
| get around verb | To move to the other side of (something, such as an obstruction) by deviating from a direct course or following a curved path. |
| blow off verb | To vent, usually, to reduce pressure in a container. |
| book up verb | To reserve or book all of something, for example by purchasing all the tickets. |
| come up verb | To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly. |
| dress up verb | To put on special or fancy clothes. |
| drift off verb | To fall asleep slowly. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- That is, can I form an image?
- Can my reader form an image?
- What is it that you love so much about children's explanations?
- Knowing what we know about large -time shows?
- Would you have written the same books?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | he's been thinking · that's been going |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if it's abstract, won't call |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | haven't learned · they've been immersed · you've done |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is captured · be explained · had been invited |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 182 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, they're, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, smoothly /ˈsmuːðli/, authenticity /ɑθɛnˈtɪsɪti/, aesthetics /ɛsˈθɛt.ɪks/, bath /bɑːθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, flesh /flɛʃ/, profession /pɹəˈfɛʃ.ən/, sheer /ʃɪɚ/, detention /dɪˈtɛnʃn̩/
- Long words — get the stress right: necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, academia /ˌæk.əˈdi.mi.ə/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, accessible /əkˈsɛs.ɪ.bəl/, molecular /məˈlɛk.jə.ləɹ/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like prose, curse, refer.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.