Prática de Shadowing: Harvard Professor Explains The Rules of Writing (Steven Pinker Interview) - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
Escolha um modo de prática
Cada modo abre uma sala de prática em tela cheia.
560 frases
Se as frases estiverem muito curtas ou longas, clique em Edit para ajustá-las.
1
I'm here at Harvard in the office of Steven Pinker.
2
And he's written nine books and devoted his life to studying language and cognition and writing.
3
And so what we did in this interview is we started off with the really practical stuff.
4
We started off with his rules for writing.
5
And what makes him unique is that he's been thinking about AI since the 1980s.
6
So if you're interested in doing great nonfiction writing in the age of LLMs, well, this interview is for you.
7
I want to talk about The Curse of Knowledge
8
and I want to talk about this this cartoon from your book
9
which says good start needs more gibberish yes
10
when I pose the question why is there
11
so much bad writing why is there so much academies
12
and bureaucraties and corporates people's favorite answer is captured by
13
that cartoon namely that bad writing is a deliberate choice
14
that it's in various versions it's academics with nothing to say
15
dress up banal ideas with gobbledygook to show how sophisticated they are
16
or pasty -faced nerds get revenge on the girls who turned
17
them down for dates in high school mm -hmm people want to erect a kind of cult
18
that no one else outsiders can't penetrate
19
because they haven't learned the jargon I don't think that's the
20
best explanation for bad writing partly it's personal I just know
21
enough people who have plenty to say they're brilliant people they
22
have no desire to obfuscate they're just uh incompetent they just
23
don't know how to express themselves clearly there's something called hanlon's razor never attribute to malice
24
that which can adequately be explained by stupidity yeah and uh
25
that isn't these are not stupid people i'm talking about
26
but it's a kind of stupidity in not knowing where your audience is coming from.
27
And I illustrate it with an anecdote of a conference in technology, entertainment, and design, better known by its acronym,
28
TED, where a brilliant molecular biologist had been invited to present his latest findings.
29
He launched into what was obvious to me is the exact kind of talk
30
that he would give to his peers in molecular biology.
31
And that within about four seconds, he had lost everyone because he just spoke in jargon without even introducing what problem he was solving,
32
why it was significant.
33
It was launched right into the experiments.
34
There was a room of several hundred people from many walks of life, from entertainment, from design.
35
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.
36
Now, this is, you know, not a stupid man, but he was very stupid when it came to communication.
37
Namely, not everyone knows what you know.
38
Now, the curse of knowledge, a term from economics, is
39
the difficulty that we all have in knowing what it's like not to know something that we know.
40
That is to subtract something from your brain, put yourself in the shoes of your audience,
41
whether it be in public speaking or in writing, figure out where are they coming from.
42
What do they know?
43
What don't they know?
44
I think that's the main cause of bad writing.
45
You get abbreviations and acronyms that no one has any way of knowing.
46
You have jargon
47
that is known only to a tiny little clique you have
48
abstractions the level of the stimulus was proportional to the intensity of the reaction
49
and what it really means is
50
that people kids look longer at a bunny than a truck
51
so that is it it's so familiar to you
52
that you don't think it's worth explaining to people concretely what they're supposed to be seen right
53
so all of these are manifestations of the curse of knowledge goes by other names
54
egocentrism absence of a theory of mind that is a theory of what's going on in other people's minds
55
and i if i had to identify the the single biggest flaw in writing
56
and communication it would be that that's it so
57
when you're writing your books i know you go up to
58
cape con you write for like you know as long as you possibly can now i would assume
59
that one way to get around the curse of knowledge is
60
just to talk to the kinds of people who would be reading your book yeah you show it to people
61
so what do you do what do you do
62
because you you know you write really intensely so
63
when you're writing how do you get around that well I do something
64
that is I know is not good enough
65
but I do it as best I can
66
which is I try to imagine what it's like for someone not to know what I know
67
that is I try to cultivate my sense of empathy
68
but the problem with the curse of knowledge is you don't know
69
when you're subject to the curse of knowledge because something that seems.
70
So obvious to you that you don't even question whether other people know it turns out not to be obvious.
71
So anyway, I try but at the end of the day, I show it to people.
72
When my mother was alive, I would always show her a draft of my book.
73
Not for the reason that most academics cite,
74
namely referring to my mother as the epitome of a unsophisticated,
75
not very well -read, not very bright person.
76
My mother was extremely intelligent, extremely well -read, and very sophisticated, but she wasn't a cognitive psychologist.
77
She wasn't a psycholinguist.
78
She didn't know what I knew.
79
And when I write, I don't write for a random sample of the population.
80
They don't buy my books.
81
I write for people who are intellectually curious, who have some degree of education.
82
However, not for peers in my field.
83
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,
84
but again, not in your field.
85
And I show it to people in different fields who are academics,
86
but it's surprising how insular even academics are when it comes to other academics.
87
Sometimes there'll be people here in this building in my own department, sometimes my own subdivision within my own department,
88
like students, and they'll give me their thesis proposal, and I just don't know what they're talking about.
89
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,
90
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.
91
Yeah.
92
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,
93
not being a cognitive psychologist, they'll say, I'm sorry about it.
94
I just don't know what you're talking about.
95
Yeah.
96
In terms of your writing, you've done so much work looking at vision and how the brain works.
97
And it seems like a lot of your writing advice is informed by
98
that like i guess
99
if i were to try to summarize it it's like a lot of our brain
100
and basically the way that we move through the world is indexed heavily on vision
101
and so writing well means being concrete
102
and helping people see what it is they're trying to write is
103
that a good way of describing it yes and
104
that would be my
105
that probably the second bit of second advice on the list
106
okay first one being find some way of getting into get into your reader's heads
107
but don't just depend on your ability to get their heads actually get a flesh
108
and blood person to actually read it and see if it makes any sense to them.
109
So that'd be number one.
110
Number two is, you know, I study language and, you know, as a writer, I live in language,
111
but language is kind of overrated in the sense that what understanding consists of is not a bunch of words.
112
It's not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
113
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,
114
and those ideas very often are visual, you know, and motoric, that is,
115
you know, bodily, emotional, auditory, but they're sensory.
116
Or they're even conceptual, but they aren't just a bunch of vowels and consonants. And
117
so constantly allowing your reader to be able to form a
118
mental image based on what you're writing is the next key to good writing.
119
That is, don't talk about a stimulus if you mean a bunny rabbit.
120
don't talk about a level or a perspective or a framework or a paradigm or a concept all of which
121
mean a lot to you in your day -to -day work
122
but no one can form an image of a paradigm in their mind's eye
123
so how do you do that like one thing
124
that you've said is use for example all the time what else can we do
125
so often you know visual metaphors are helpful one of the reasons
126
that often the prose of other eras strikes us as
127
so much more vivid it's gonna say lush lush yes partly because they had the advantage of
128
writing before there were you know several hundred years of academia
129
and intellectuals inventing terms and abstractions and they had to appeal to
130
images that were part of people's common knowledge
131
so instead of saying something like aggression
132
or antisocial behavior they might say the spirit of the of
133
the hawk needed into our flesh yes you know we wouldn't write like
134
that because we can say you know aggression or antisocial behavior
135
but and that's jargon that a lot of people are familiar with but they weren't always with us.
136
And before that, there had to be some way of referring to it in terms of an image that everyone shared.
137
And I think that's why often the writing of previous centuries just strikes us as so much more gripping,
138
so much more evocative and powerful that they had to appeal to visual metaphors.
139
Yeah, I've never thought about that before because a lot of the Bible's like that.
140
I think of like, I don't know why the owl of Minerva came to mind.
141
There's just all of this symbolism in animals.
142
It always is striking.
143
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,
144
but they do lack that kind of visual quality that makes writing vivid.
145
That's right.
146
So they do make it, in fact, they're essential for doing the work within the profession.
147
You have to be able, if you're a biologist,
148
you have to be able to talk about things like ecosystems and species and systems and reagents and potentiation,
149
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.
150
And when it increases over time, we call it, you know, you're beyond that after you're a freshman.
151
And so you have more and more abstract terms that you could refer to, enormous bodies of knowledge just with like two syllables.
152
That's very good.
153
Right.
154
The problem is that then now
155
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,
156
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.
157
What do we need to know about writers about how hard writing is?
158
And I mean it in this way.
159
Speaking comes so naturally to us, but then writing is something that we sort of have to learn, right?
160
You watch a kid and you talk to a parent who has a 20 -month -old.
161
They're like, yeah, you know, they're speaking now.
162
They're like, oh, you know, you wouldn't believe it.
163
You know, they're talking so much.
164
They're crawling around.
165
And it's always like, yeah, it's like that.
166
And then you talk to them who have parents who have an 8 -year -old kid.
167
It's like, how's the writing going?
168
It's like, well, you know, it's going a little slow.
169
There's not that same excitement.
170
And so it's as if, like, why is it that writing is so unnatural in a way that speaking is so natural?
171
Like, what is going on there scientifically and then practically?
172
A number of things.
173
One of them is that in conversation,
174
you never have two people that are parachuted on a stage and immediately have to begin a conversation.
175
They have some common ground to begin with.
176
They know why they're there.
177
They're talking about something that is in the air
178
that they're both familiar with was the reason for them having the conversation in the first place.
179
They can get away with using terms
180
that in context are perfectly clear like this and that and the thing and what I was talking about and she.
181
Whereas if you are not privy to that little social circle, you may not know who they're referring to.
182
In writing, you're wrenched from the context.
183
Someone's picking a book up off the shelf, and they've never met you, and they may be living in a different country,
184
you might be dead, they've got to pick up all of this detail from what's there on the page,
185
not what's in, not the common ground that the two people bring to the conversation.
186
Also, you know the, when you're speaking, you know that you're speaking to someone,
187
you know their idiosyncrasies you're a little bit better at avoiding the curse of knowledge partly
188
because you get feedback right the furrowed brow the quizzical expression
189
the uh the what the request for clarification i'm sorry i
190
just don't know what you're talking about uh in real time
191
and you know in the body language the engagement uh even in in a live audience uh any speaker knows
192
when people are starting to fidget and drift off as opposed to continuing to be riveted.
193
None of that is available in writing.
194
Absolutely.
195
How about this one?
196
I think generalizations without examples and examples without generalizations are both useless.
197
Yes.
198
Well, useless might be a bit strong, but generalizations without examples, I find even in my field nine out of ten times
199
I just don't know what they're talking about it's like what
200
do you like like give me an example just it's too
201
because a generalization erases detail it sweeps over particulars you often just can't really know what it's referring to
202
and and and the abstract words in a language just aren't precise enough,
203
they often have, we have probably a hundred concepts for every word in the English language.
204
And so a particular word, especially if it's abstract, won't call to mind a particular referent.
205
The example pins it down to what's the general ballpark that you're talking about?
206
What is the generalization of generalization about?
207
Now, examples of generalizations, it's, well, why did you just tell me that?
208
Like, you know, and your point is, uh, and that apropos of what?
209
One of my favorite ways to think about this is that there's always a trade -off between context and compression.
210
So if I could wax poetic for the next five hours about my train ride to Boston today,
211
but that's way too long.
212
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.
213
And that maybe we're always kind of balancing the examples, kind of give us that context, and then the generalizations are the compression,
214
and it's actually in like the swing and the dance of the two of those that good writing and good communication happens.
215
Yeah, so for example, if I were to say that familiar words don't have to refer to the literal meaning of their parts,
216
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.
217
And going to the bathroom doesn't necessarily mean going to a room that has a bathroom.
218
Breakfast isn't necessarily breaking a fast.
219
And Christmas doesn't necessarily refer to Christ's mass.
220
Now, having said that, I think you now understand what I mean
221
when I said
222
that the meaning of a familiar phrase doesn't necessarily correspond to the meanings of its parts hopefully
223
that now makes some sense to you now
224
that i've given you the examples without the examples you know you could nod
225
and say oh that sounds plausible
226
but you really wouldn't have understood it let's roll with that if adults commit adultery do infants commit infantry
227
if olive oil is made from olives what do they make baby oil from
228
if a vegetarian eats vegetables what is a humanitarian consume a writer is someone who writes
229
and a stinger is something that stings
230
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
231
what's going on there why'd you pull this out
232
so this is a quote from Richard letterer I deserve no credit for
233
that that criticism and I love this I think it's
234
so good letterer has written a number of delightful books like crazy English and anguished English.
235
He has a marvelous ear and a fabulous collector of quirks and errors and oddities and blunders in the English language.
236
So that whimsical list is quite profound because it indicates a lot of truths about language,
237
such as that over time,
238
compositions of words, compounds or words with a prefix and suffix can sometimes drift away from the original meaning.
239
The case of adultery, for example, it is related to adulterate.
240
Namely, to commit adultery is to introduce a foreign substance,
241
namely semen into a woman where it doesn't belong.
242
But that whole connection has been completely lost.
243
Also, in many kinds of compounds, there are a number of different semantic relationships that can hold.
244
So for example, olive oil is oil made out of olives.
245
Baby oil is oil for babies hmm
246
so there isn't a logical a single logical relationship between the different parts of the the compound language is
247
so ancient English itself is depending on how you count maybe you know 1500 years old
248
or more but it came from Germanic which came from Indo -European and who knows where that came from,
249
that a lot of words can completely obscure their origin.
250
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.
251
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
252
that ER turns a verb into a noun for the kind of person that typically engages in that activity,
253
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.
254
Hmm.
255
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.
256
I'd say like equal parts left brain, right brain.
257
And then we sort of moved into kind of a left brain side of the conversation.
258
And then I think of what you've said about language should be a source of pleasure.
259
Like I think of that in beauty, right?
260
You talk a lot about beauty also in your photography.
261
You're very interested in that.
262
That to me is more right brain.
263
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?
264
Well, certainly visual imagery.
265
That is, can I form an image?
266
Can my reader form an image?
267
Euphony, that is sound.
268
That is, is there some poetry in the prose?
269
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.
270
I didn't invent it.
271
Often when you read a draft of your own prose, and if you can't articulate it smoothly,
272
that probably your reader won't be mentally sounding it out smoothly either.
273
The aesthetics sometimes come from even things like paying attention to the metrical structure of language, that is the rhythm.
274
Oh, tell me about that.
275
There is a regular rhythm to language in that it's not perfectly, you know, tick -tock, tick -tock like a metronome,
276
but there are beats, and if you disrupt it too much, then it does interfere with speech, but it also interferes with reading,
277
even though it's just characters on a page.
278
Even the aesthetics of sibilant sounds.
279
Generally, too many ch's and s's make prose a little unpleasant,
280
and I will often pick a synonym that avoids the sibilant, at least too many sibilants in a row.
281
I'll often go with alliteration just because,
282
again, there's a little spark of pleasure sense of style sense of style yep even
283
when it is you don't want to make it too
284
conspicuous otherwise it starts to feel forced
285
but often a bit of alliteration can just make the sentence roll past more easily why do you think
286
that you as much as anybody have been the person to kind of stomp your feet kick
287
and scream about the how bad academic writing has been over the years like
288
when i think of who has been like guys what are
289
what are we doing yeah you've sort of been one of
290
the four the front runners what about it i mean besides the obvious what about it's just bothered you
291
so so vividly yeah part of it is um just the sheer waste
292
that is there's an awful lot of really brilliant work a
293
lot of really smart people you know in in academia
294
and you know why are they doing it just to um you know entertain each other and you know close little circle.
295
I mean, taxpayers pay for it.
296
It should be accessible.
297
They should give it away.
298
They should state it in a form that it's accessible.
299
There's also, even within the profession,
300
there's just an enormous amount of wasted effort and potential for misunderstanding in bad prose.
301
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
302
or i'm reviewing a grant proposal or peer reviewing a manuscript
303
or evaluating for someone for tenure
304
if i have to read the same paragraph like five
305
or six times in order to know what they're talking about
306
for one thing i might get it wrong then what you
307
know what's the point another is why should i have to read it five
308
or six times i'd rather be you're doing something else
309
and come on yeah uh so there there's waste there's confusion uh there's also also foregone opportunity for pleasure and beauty.
310
It's enjoyable to read something that's well crafted and it's annoying to read something that's stilted and turgid and bloated.
311
There are many reasons and it does get under my skin
312
when academics devote so much brain power into the scholarship
313
and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done.
314
Yeah, it's a true virus in the modern world.
315
Yeah.
316
I take a particular interest in it, not just because I do try very hard, even in my academic writing,
317
to be clear, but since I'm someone who actually not just studies stuff as an academic,
318
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.
319
It's like you study language.
320
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?
321
Yeah.
322
What is it that you love so much about children's explanations?
323
Things like clouds are water vapor, smoke is fire vapor.
324
Oh, yes.
325
You do see things.
326
Yes, that was from my grandson.
327
I mean, it's poetry.
328
It's a new juxtaposition.
329
There's such a freshness to children's explanations.
330
Yeah, yeah, because they are writing in cliches, and partly because they haven't accumulated this mass of abstractions,
331
like the writers of a few centuries ago, who had to grasp for some common image,
332
children, without the decades of acquired jargon from academia,
333
have to appeal to something that they can see and that other people can see.
334
Yeah.
335
There's a guy who I follow on Twitter who I've really come to like.
336
And in his bio, it says, listen to children.
337
They haven't forgotten how to see.
338
And I know a YouTuber, and one of the ways
339
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?
340
How high would a tower need to be in order for us to get to heaven
341
and then like i have another friend who
342
when he was a kid he thought
343
that clouds were produced by those little smoke things uh sort of like chimneys
344
so he thought that those were like cloud creators oh
345
and there's such a freshness to just how children see
346
and how they talk about things
347
and like you said they're there they can't possibly think inside the box
348
because they don't even know the box exists yes right
349
and there were there there there are have been in history various features to remind people of the originality
350
and the freshness of kids there was a regular feature from
351
my childhood called kids say the darndest things from a television
352
host named art art linkletter long yeah i've heard of him
353
oh you have okay yeah in fact what has survived him
354
and the uh and the feature of the the program is the say the darndest things
355
or even the verb the darndest nouns, which you'll often see adopted in headlines,
356
and it's become itself a kind of formula, but he originated it.
357
Johnny Carson, the long -time host of The Tonight Show,
358
would sometimes have features where he'd read kids' answers to questions to much hilarity.
359
How does humor factor into all this?
360
Into writing?
361
Yeah, exactly.
362
and even maybe even the science of humor like words
363
that are funnier because you have
364
that great talk from like 10 years ago where you I'm
365
gonna recommend yeah well there's I guess like everything there's an art to it
366
because you don't want to wait
367
when it's strained you get groans instead of laughter yeah
368
so it has to be appropriate it can't just be something
369
that has been repeated so often that people have heard it 37 times before right
370
and humor specifically depends on freshness yeah it does
371
and it also depends humor does have much in common with good writing there's a line from Hamlet
372
which a brevity is the soul of wit yeah now it's
373
a great saying for a number of reasons one of them
374
is even the term soul as opposed to is essential for wit
375
or is important for wit or even the essence of wit um those are ways
376
that we would say it now
377
but the soul of wit you have to think for a minute soul being the the deepest deepest essence
378
but it's a monosyllable and it has so much uh uh resonance
379
that you know i guess that
380
that shakes me really was a good writer wasn't he yeah i've heard
381
that guy yeah um but it's also it is uh it is true
382
and it's a good example of itself because it is
383
so brief it was reiterated centuries later in the famous style manual the elements of style by Strunk
384
and white where professor Strunk in lectures at Cornell that E .B.
385
White recalled and then turned into a book would say
386
that the first rule of writing is omit needless words now again it's a beautiful example of itself
387
because there are no needless words in it and he said
388
that sometimes professor Strunk would be so adamant and so insistent
389
that this was the almost the only thing you need to know about writing
390
that he would just not know what to do except repeat it
391
and you say omit needless words omit needless words omit needless words
392
and you know as with brevity is the soul of wit aside from being an example of itself it is
393
so true that But sometimes when I have to...
394
uh compress an article to fit into some fixed space especially
395
if i'm writing for a newspaper or magazine
396
and say you know unlike academia where you can blather on uh with no one telling you to shut up
397
when you have to write for a paper they'll say sorry 800 words
398
and if it's you know 800 803 words the editor will chop off three words
399
and you don't get to say what they are
400
and it can often mangle the meaning
401
so you have to actually learn how to say something in 800 words
402
or however many words it is
403
but what i find is often just the exercise of squeezing it into
404
that uh that maximum limit just improves the prose as
405
if by magic it's like oh you know damn i have to like make this shorter
406
and i thought i had said it perfectly then often
407
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.
Baixar aplicativo
Tudo o que você precisa para falar fluentemente
Pronúncia com IANota em cada frase
Prática de IPADomine cada som
VocabulárioMonte seu banco de palavras
Jogo de vocabulárioAprenda brincando
Mesmo canal
C1Why is the English Language So Standardized — Ocean Vuong
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
Literature Might Not Save You — Ocean Vuong
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B25
Write Something No One Ever Has — Ocean Vuong
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B2This Is What a Harvard Writing Masterclass Feels Like (Francine Prose Interview)
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
FOR YOU
Vídeo recomendado
C11
710 frases
The truth about peptides, NAD, & other longevity treatments | Rachele Pojednic, Ph.D.
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
85 frases
AI Will End Philosophy, Physicist Claims
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
236 frases
【日英字幕】2026ハーバード卒業演説 自身のハーバード学生生活から人生の教訓まで、ユーモアを交えて語るコナン流感動の卒業スピーチ
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C120
53 frases
Harvard negotiator explains how to argue | Dan Shapiro
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
290 frases
Why Is Everyone So Unhappy?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
546 frases
Do Elite Degrees Still Matter In The AI Era? | Jamie Beaton from Crimson Education | EP 410
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
260 frases
【TED】優れたリーダーはどうやって行動を促すか/サイモン・シネック （日本語字幕）
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
148 frases
How to Speak Articulately
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
480 frases
The Devastating Note That Nearly Made Adam Grant Quit Teaching
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B24
132 frases
Are we heading to an era of stagnation or innovation?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1180
24 frases
The uncomfortable truth | Yuval Noah Harari
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
Vocabulário e dicas de fala para esta lição
Esta aula de conversação usa o vídeo “Harvard Professor Explains The Rules of Writing”. Este vídeo tem 560 frases e 6962 palavras para praticar shadowing. A fala dura 43:28. O falante fala em ritmo natural, cerca de 160 palavras por minuto, próximo de uma conversa do dia a dia. 83% das palavras estão entre as 3.000 mais comuns do inglês; vale a pena estudar o restante antes de começar.
Vocabulário principal deste vídeo
15 palavras do vídeo que vale a pena aprender, com pronúncia e significado:
| Palavra | Pronúncia | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| prose substantivo | /ˈpɹoʊz/ | prosa |
| curse substantivo | /kɝs/ | maldição |
| refer verbo | /ɹɪˈfɜː/ | encaminhar |
| namely advérbio | /ˈneɪmli/ | leia-se, nomeadamente |
| humour substantivo | /ˈhjuːmɚ/ | humor |
| partly advérbio | /ˈpɑɹtli/ | em parte |
| needless adjetivo | /ˈniːdləs/ | desnecessário |
| necessarily advérbio | /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/ | necessariamente |
| reader substantivo | /ˈɹi.dɚ/ | leitor, leitora |
| whereas | /(h)wɛɹˈæz/ | enquanto, ao passo que |
| cognitive adjetivo | /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ | cognitivo |
| olive substantivo | /ˈɑ.lɪv/ | azeitona, oliva |
| academia substantivo | /ˌæk.əˈdi.mi.ə/ | academia |
| cloud substantivo | /ˈklaʊ̯d/ | nuvem, nimbo |
| explanation substantivo | /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/ | explicação, explanação |
Phrasal verbs que você vai ouvir
| Palavra | Pronúncia | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| come up with verbo | pensar (em), alcançar | |
| figure out verbo | descobrir, deduzir | |
| get away with verbo | passar batido | |
| pick up verbo | pegar | |
| put up verbo | afixar | |
| shut up | /ʃʌt ʌp/ | cala a boca, cale-se |
| turn out verbo | terminar |
Frases que vale a pena repetir
Frases curtas e completas do vídeo que você pode usar na conversa do dia a dia:
- 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?
Gramática neste vídeo
As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:
| Estrutura | No vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — uma ação que começou antes e continua | he's been thinking · that's been going |
| Frases condicionais if + oração, will/would + verbo — uma condição e seu resultado | if it's abstract, won't call |
| Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agora | haven't learned · they've been immersed · you've done |
| Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz | is captured · be explained · had been invited |
Pronúncia para ficar de olho
O falante usa 182 contrações e formas reduzidas, como don't, they're, you're. Diga-as na forma curta, do jeito que você ouve.
- Os sons de “th”: rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, smoothly /ˈsmuːðli/, authenticity /ɑθɛnˈtɪsɪti/, aesthetics /ɛsˈθɛt.ɪks/, bath /bɑːθ/
- Os sons de “sh” e “zh”: explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, flesh /flɛʃ/, profession /pɹəˈfɛʃ.ən/, sheer /ʃɪɚ/, detention /dɪˈtɛnʃn̩/
- Palavras longas — acerte a sílaba tônica: necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, academia /ˌæk.əˈdi.mi.ə/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, accessible /əkˈsɛs.ɪ.bəl/, molecular /məˈlɛk.jə.ləɹ/
Sons difíceis para falantes de português:
- Consoante final — sem acrescentar um “i” depois: input /ˈɪnpʊt/, cloud /ˈklaʊ̯d/, commit /kəˈmɪt/, abstract /ˈæbˌstɹækt/, vivid /ˈvɪvɪd/
- /l/ final — a língua toca o céu da boca, não vira “u”: logical /ˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/, proposal /pɹəˈpoʊzəl/, awful /ˈɔːfʊl/, accessible /əkˈsɛs.ɪ.bəl/, neural /ˈnʊɹəl/
- /h/ — um sopro suave, diferente do “r”: humour /ˈhjuːmɚ/, whereas /(h)wɛɹˈæz/, helpful /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/, handsome /ˈhæn.səm/
Como praticar com este vídeo
- Ouça o vídeo inteiro uma vez sem falar e anote as palavras que você não conhece.
- Comece na velocidade 0,75×, faça shadowing frase por frase e volte à velocidade normal quando ficar fácil.
- Grave a sua voz e compare com o original, prestando atenção a palavras como prose, curse, refer.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.