If someone clapped out the rhythm of a song you knew, would you recognize it? It’s pretty unlikely, given what’s called the curse of knowledge. To the person with the song in their head, it’s obvious, but you can’t expect anyone else to hear it. It’s an important concept for anyone who wants to be a better writer. This is among many fascinating concepts discussed in Steven Pinker’s new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which some are calling the new Strunk and White. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “That Song in Your Head”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Several years ago, a researcher at Stanford conducted a study in which she asked people to tap out rhythms to songs that they had in their heads, and other people were supposed to guess what the songs were.
Like, for example, I have a song in my head. Try to guess what it is. It sounds like a clap that they do at baseball games.
No, no.
What is it?
No, that’s somewhere over the rainbow.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, it is.
What am I missing here?
What’s going on here is what we call the curse of knowledge in that I have the whole thing in my head, but you’re not hearing it at all.
And in fact, that’s what happened in this study. People guess only 3% of 120 or so songs that people were tapping out.
And I was thinking about this recently as I was reading the fabulous new book called The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. He’s the psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist who often writes about language.
And he has this fantastic chapter in the book where he talks about the fact that the main cause of incomprehensible prose is that kind of curse. It’s the difficulty of imagining what the reader is taking in.
So what I’ve heard is that this book is probably the new Strunk and White.
Yes. Even if you have differences of opinion about his various style and grammar rules that he’s talking about, in general his argument for writing well and clearly is so perfectly explained that this is a great tool for any beginning or even well-established writer to kind of feel supported, feel the impetus, a little wind in their sails from somebody who gets the process and understands what it takes to do good writing.
Exactly.
Yeah, people cling to Strunk and White so tightly, so many of them. But the fact is that William Strunk was born in 1869. So some of his advice is a little stale, even with E.B. White’s improvements.
Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about a dynamic, changing thing. And I can’t recommend Pinker’s book highly enough.
We’ll talk more about it later. Pinker’s The Sense of Style. You can find it in your bookshops on Amazon.com.
If you’ve got a question about language, something to say, or an opinion about Stephen Pinker’s book, we’d love to hear it.
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