Wikipedia Flunks Again

"It's Wikipedia again."

I hate to single out Wikipedia as a hopelessly putrid cesspool of amateur pedantry masquerading as knowledge, but frankly its authors (some of them, at least; not all) leave me little choice. One cannot wade into Wikipedia's murky waters, and hope to survive the experience, without wearing the linguistic equivalent of a hazmat suit.

Recently (don't ask me why), I ran into the following bit of verbal chunder floating around on the Cultural Cognition page. This is the first paragraph under the first subheading ("Cultural Cognition Thesis") of the article.

A study, by Dan M. Kahan and his colleagues, collected data on the climate-change risk perceptions of large representative samples of US adults. The study measured assessments of two opposing viewpoints of public opinion on climate change. Science Comprehension thesis (SCT) argues that because the public does not presumably know the information scientists do about climate change, they do not take it as seriously. Cultural cognition thesis (CCT) argues that people tend to form opinions of risk based on their social and cultural group they identify with. CCT model findings: People, who subscribe to a hierarchical, individualistic world-view that ties authority to social rankings and avoids interference with the decisions of such authority, tend to be skeptical of environmental risks. They perceive that widespread acceptance of climate change risks would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry. These are things hierarchical individualists value. In contrast, people who hold an egalitarian, communitarian world-view, which favors looser social organization and attending to collective needs over individualistic ones, usually are suspicious of commerce and industry. As a result, they find those industries worthy of restriction. The research data shows that egalitarian communitarians are more concerned than hierarchical individualists with climate change risks.

How does one even begin to tease apart such a confused tangle of pseudo-academic blather? The author of this entry begins by telling us about a study (attributed, without a reference, to one Dan M. Kahan and his nameless colleagues). After two sentences, the Kahan study is never heard from again. Instead, we go straight into "Science Comprehension thesis" (which is never defined, and for which there is no Wikipedia entry), but after one sentence, we never hear anything about that again, either.

I keep seeing the word "hierarchical" in this passage (as in "hierarchical individualists"), but it's not at all clear what the logical connection is between hierachy and any of the concepts presented. Why do we care about hierarchy? What does it have to do with anything?

It turns out the connection with hierarchy traces to work done by cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas. She introduces the concept in her book Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology  (which, interestingly enough, has nothing whatsoever to do with astrophysics). A full discussion of Douglas is beyond the scope of this blog, of course. The important point is that by omitting a discussion of Douglas's well-known (to cultural anthropologists) "group vs. grid" way of looking at social organization, in which hierarchy is paramount, the author of the Cultural Cognition article not only confuses readers but destroys the meaning of the entire passage.

What's the author trying to say? The Wikipedia entry is about Cultural Cognition, so let's assume the author is trying to write about that. It seems logical to start by stating what cultural cognition is. So do that first. Then explain how the theory might be used to make some sort of prediction(s). If research exists to support the prediction(s), mention it and give citations.

If my only task is to rewrite the paragraph shown above (rather than seal it in a lead-lined container and bury it in the Nevada desert), I would (over)simplify it as follows:

The Cultural Cognition theory of risk centers on the idea that people tend to form opinions of risk based on the values of the social group with which they self-identify. Under this theory, people who favor an individual-centric worldview tend to identify with a cultural perspective that devalues collective needs. Similarly, people who favor an egalitarian or communitarian worldview identify with a cultural perspective that values collective needs over individual ones. These differing perspectives give rise to culturally biased risk perceptions, wherein an individual's own assessment of risk is colored by, for example, political beliefs. [reference needed]

If it turns out that the foregoing explanation is too simplistic and ignores relevant aspects of Douglas's group-grid theory, then group-grid theory needs to be introduced first, with a paragraph that begins something like: "In order  to understand Cultural Cognition theory, it's first necessary to understand Douglas's group-grid formulation of cultural worldviews."

If studies exist to back up the cultural cognition theory, they should be discussed in a separate paragraph (and appropriate citations given).

But frankly, fixing this type of Wikipedia entry is a fool's errand. The passage as written can't be made whole with mere revision any more than a Toyota Camry that's been broadsided by a locomotive can be made whole with mere replacement of damaged parts. It's out-and-out junk. Unfixable garbage, front to back. Do not try to repair. Do not remove plastic cover. No user serviceable parts.

In a word: FUBAR.

The Top 100 Novels of All Time (Supposedly)

I've been reading a book, The Novel 100: A Ranking of Greatest Novels All Time (Checkmark Books/Facts On File, Inc.: New York, 2004), by Daniel S. Burt. It purports to list the best novels of all time (from all countries), ranked by I'm-not-sure-what.

Burt does a pretty good job of articulating (in short chapters, averaging 3 pages) why he sees these as the best books ever. You may or may not agree with his choices, but his mini-analyses are suitably trenchant.

One "novel" on this list is well over a million words long. Another is unfinished. Can you guess which ones I'm talking about? (Answers: Nos. 4 and 51, respectively.)

One novel's main character rarely gets off the couch unless it's to go to bed. There is essentially no action. (No. 82.) 

One novel's protagonist is a pedophile. (Answer: No. 47, of course.)

One novel was thoroughly reviled by the author of another novel on the list. (I'm talking, of course, about No. 88, which was despised by the author of No. 14.)

Two novels on the list are by the same author. One was, for a time, banned in the U.S. The other, upon publication, was assailed by critics as a waste of paper. (Give up? Nos. 3 and 26. The former was banned.)

What's your opinion of the list?

1	Don Quixote	1605, 1630	Miguel de Cervantes
2	War and Peace	1869	Leo Tolstoy
3	Ulysses	1922	James Joyce
4	In Search of Lost Time	1913-27	Marcel Proust
5	The Brothers Karamazov	1880	Feodor Dostoevsky
6	Moby-Dick	1851	Herman Melville
7	Madame Bovary	1857	Gustave Flaubert
8	Middlemarch	1871-72	George Eliot
9	The Magic Mountain	1924	Thomas Mann
10	The Tale of Genji	11th Century	Murasaki Shikibu
11	Emma	1816	Jane Austen
12	Bleak House	1852-53	Charles Dickens
13	Anna Karenina	1877	Leo Tolstoy
14	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	1884	Mark Twain
15	Tom Jones	1749	Henry Fielding
16	Great Expectations	1860-61	Charles Dickens
17	Absalom, Absalom!	1936	William Faulkner
18	The Ambassadors	1903	Henry James
19	One Hundred Years of Solitude	1967	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20	The Great Gatsby	1925	F. Scott Fitzgerald
21	To The Lighthouse	1927	Virginia Woolf
22	Crime and Punishment	1866	Feodor Dostoevsky
23	The Sound and the Fury	1929	William Faulkner
24	Vanity Fair	1847-48	William Makepeace Thackeray
25	Invisible Man	1952	Ralph Ellison
26	Finnegans Wake	1939	James Joyce
27	The Man Without Qualities	1930-43	Robert Musil
28	Gravity's Rainbow	1973	Thomas Pynchon
29	The Portrait of a Lady	1881	Henry James
30	Women in Love	1920	D. H. Lawrence
31	The Red and the Black	1830	Stendhal
32	Tristram Shandy	1760-67	Laurence Sterne
33	Dead Souls	1842	Nikolai Gogol
34	Tess of the D'Urbervilles	1891	Thomas Hardy
35	Buddenbrooks	1901	Thomas Mann
36	Le Pere Goriot	1835	Honore de Balzac
37	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	1916	James Joyce
38	Wuthering Heights	1847	Emily Bronte
39	The Tin Drum	1959	Gunter Grass
40	Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable	1951-53	Samuel Beckett
41	Pride and Prejudice	1813	Jane Austen
42	The Scarlet Letter	1850	Nathaniel Hawthorne
43	Fathers and Sons	1862	Ivan Turgenev
44	Nostromo	1904	Joseph Conrad
45	Beloved	1987	Toni Morrison
46	An American Tragedy	1925	Theodore Dreiser
47	Lolita	1955	Vladimir Nabokov
48	The Golden Notebook	1962	Doris Lessing
49	Clarissa	1747-48	Samuel Richardson
50	Dream of the Red Chamber	1791	Cao Xueqin
51	The Trial	1925	Franz Kafka
52	Jane Eyre	1847	Charlotte Bronte
53	The Red Badge of Courage	1895	Stephen Crane
54	The Grapes of Wrath	1939	John Steinbeck
55	Petersburg	1916/1922	Andrey Bely
56	Things Fall Apart	1958	Chinue Achebe
57	The Princess of Cleves	1678	Madame de Lafayette
58	The Stranger	1942	Albert Camus
59	My Antonia	1918	Willa Cather
60	The Counterfeiters	1926	Andre Gide
61	The Age of Innocence	1920	Edith Wharton
62	The Good Soldier	1915	Ford Madox Ford
63	The Awakening	1899	Kate Chopin
64	A Passage to India	1924	E. M. Forster
65	Herzog	1964	Saul Bellow
66	Germinal	1855	Emile Zola
67	Call It Sleep	1934	Henry Roth
68	U.S.A. Trilogy	1930-38	John Dos Passos
69	Hunger	1890	Knut Hamsun
70	Berlin Alexanderplatz	1929	Alfred Doblin
71	Cities of Salt	1984-89	'Abd al-Rahman Munif
72	The Death of Artemio Cruz	1962	Carlos Fuentes
73	A Farewell to Arms	1929	Ernest Hemingway
74	Brideshead Revisited	1945	Evelyn Waugh
75	The Last Chronicle of Barset	1866-67	Anthony Trollope
76	The Pickwick Papers	1836-67	Charles Dickens
77	Robinson Crusoe	1719	Daniel Defoe
78	The Sorrows of Young Werther	1774	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79	Candide	1759	Voltaire
80	Native Son	1940	Richard Wright
81	Under the Volcano	1947	Malcolm Lowry
82	Oblomov	1859	Ivan Goncharov
83	Their Eyes Were Watching God	1937	Zora Neale Hurston
84	Waverley	1814	Sir Walter Scott
85	Snow Country	1937, 1948	Kawabata Yasunari
86	Nineteen Eighty-Four	1949	George Orwell
87	The Betrothed	1827, 1840	Alessandro Manzoni
88	The Last of the Mohicans	1826	James Fenimore Cooper
89	Uncle Tom's Cabin	1852	Harriet Beecher Stowe
90	Les Miserables	1862	Victor Hugo
91	On the Road	1957	Jack Kerouac
92	Frankenstein	1818	Mary Shelley
93	The Leopard	1958	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
94	The Catcher in the Rye	1951	J.D. Salinger
95	The Woman in White	1860	Wilkie Collins
96	The Good Soldier Svejk	1921-23	Jaroslav Hasek
97	Dracula	1897	Bram Stoker
98	The Three Musketeers	1844	Alexandre Dumas
99	The Hound of Baskervilles	1902	Arthur Conan Doyle
100	Gone with the Wind	1936	Margaret Mitchell

Stop Stealing from Shakespeare

I remember, in college, writing a paper I thought was pretty darned good. It came back with scores of words and phrases circled, with the notation "trite."

I was "shocked beyond belief" to see things like "the fact of the matter" and "high time" and "as luck would have it" circled. I actually thought that such colloquialisms, precisely because of their familiarity, would make my paper "easier to digest" and better "all the way around." (The quoted phrases are trite, of course.) It never occurred to me that perfectly serviceable everyday phrases could actually be a bad thing.

Decades later, I see my professor's point. It's not that trite phrases aren't easy to understand (they obviously are, or people wouldn't use them) but that they're unoriginal, bland, banal, and bromidic. They represent missed opportunities to inject vitality into a piece of writing.

The surprising thing about cliches in English is how ancient some of them are. Many of our most cherished cliches are, in fact, over 400 years old and trace directly to Shakespeare.

• all that glitters ("glisters") is not gold (The Merchant of Venice)
• all's well that ends well (title)
• as good luck would have it (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
• bated breath (The Merchant of Venice)
• a charmed life (Macbeth)
• be-all and end-all (Macbeth)
• better foot before ("best foot forward") (King John)
• the better part of valor is discretion (I Henry IV)
• neither a borrower nor a lender be (Hamlet)
• brave new world (The Tempest)
• break the ice (The Taming of the Shrew)
• budge an inch (Measure for Measure / Taming of the Shrew)
• cold comfort (The Taming of the Shrew / King John)
• come what come may ("come what may") (Macbeth)
• dead as a doornail (2 Henry VI)
• (let slip) the dogs of war (Julius Caesar)
• devil incarnate (Titus Andronicus / Henry V)
• eaten me out of house and home (2 Henry IV)
• elbow room (King John)
• faint hearted (I Henry VI)
• fancy-free (Midsummer Night's Dream)
• fight till the last gasp (I Henry VI)
• flaming youth (Hamlet)
• forever and a day (As You Like It)
• for goodness' sake (Henry VIII)
• foregone conclusion (Othello)
• full circle (King Lear)
• the game is up (Cymbeline)
• give the devil his due (I Henry IV)
• good riddance (Troilus and Cressida)
• it is as Greek to me (Julius Caesar)
• heart of gold (Henry V)
• high time (The Comedy of Errors)
• hoist with his own petard (Hamlet)
• household words (Henry V)
• ill wind (2 Henry IV)
• heart of hearts (Hamlet)
• mind's eye (Hamlet)
• in a pickle (The Tempest)
• it smells to heaven (Hamlet)
• kill with kindness (Taming of the Shrew)
• killing frost (Henry VIII)
• knit brow (The Rape of Lucrece)
• laughing stock (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
• laugh yourself into stitches (Twelfth Night)
• lean and hungry (Julius Caesar)
• lie low (Much Ado about Nothing)
• live long day (Julius Caesar)
• love is blind (Merchant of Venice)
• strange bedfellows (The Tempest)
• Much Ado About Nothing (title)
• naked truth (Love's Labours Lost)
• neither rhyme nor reason (As You Like It)
• not slept one wink (Cymbeline)
• one fell swoop (Macbeth)
• loved not wisely but too well (Othello)
• jaws of death (Twelfth Night)
• flesh and blood (Hamlet)
• star-crossed lovers (Romeo and Juliet)
• what's past is prologue (The Tempest)
• pitched battle (Taming of the Shrew)
• play fast and loose (King John)
• pomp and circumstance (Othello)
• pound of flesh (The Merchant of Venice)
• primrose path (Hamlet)
• salad days (Antony and Cleopatra)
• sea change (The Tempest)
• seen better days (As You Like It)
• send packing (I Henry IV)
• make short shrift (Richard III)
• sick at heart (Hamlet)
• snail paced (Troilus and Cressida)
• something in the wind (The Comedy of Errors)
• something wicked this way comes (Macbeth)
• sorry sight (Macbeth)
• sound and fury (Macbeth)
• spotless reputation (Richard II)
• the short and the long of it (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
• sweets to the sweet (Hamlet)
• there's the rub (Hamlet)
• too much of a good thing (As You Like It)
• tower of strength (Richard III)
• truth will out (The Merchant of Venice)
• wear my heart upon my sleeve (Othello)
• what's done is done (Macbeth)
• a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. (Romeo and Juliet)
• what the dickens (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
• wild-goose chase (Romeo and Juliet)
• the world's my oyster (Merry Wives of Windsor)
• yeoman's service (Hamlet)

Any time you use one of these stock phrases (so original in their own time; so stale in ours), you're joining a centuries-old procession of uninspired writers who've chosen convention over creativity, banality over originality, processed white flour over whole-grain goodness. Plus you're stealing from another writer. I say leave the poor ba(sta)rd alone. He's been plagiarized way too many times.

Why Passive Voice Gets Writers in Trouble

The spiky doorknob on the door to Evil.

Passive voice causes a lot of trouble, for readers as well as writers. But it's clearly not evil.

Someone who writes "No murder weapon was found" is guilty of no grammar felony, no diction misdemeanor.

If we're honest, we have to admit that in many cases, passive voice is actually the best way to say something.

Why, then, does passive voice get such a bad rap? I have my own theories. (I stay up late at night thinking about this sort of thing.)

Writing is linear. Words are written (and read) sequentially. As you read a sentence, word by word, you try to parse it for meaning. My theory is that when you can parse a sentence sequentially, as you read it, it's an "easy" sentence and a rewarding reading experience. Example: When you read something like "The dog barked at the man," you encounter the subject (dog) first, the action-word (barked) second, and the object of the barking (the man) third. That's what I would call natural parse order. The sentence is, in some sense, self-parsing, because the things you need to know occur in the order in which you need to know them (dog -->bark -->man).

When you encounter "The man was barked at by the dog," you have man< -- bark< -- dog, which is harder to make sense of, because it's not in natural parse order. The actor in this sentence (the dog) is at the end. You have to read to the end before you can be 100% sure how to decipher the sentence. But you get an added anti-bonus: the sentence is 25% longer than the active-voice version. Your brain needs to stay online 25% longer.

Funny things start to happen to your writing when you begin to not give a crap about parse order. The first thing that happens is, you start using a lot more passive voice (because you can!), which also means your sentences get longer. Also, suddenly it's possible to write sentences that lack an actor. The longer a sentence is, the more your reader's brain screams out for an actor, a doer, an identifiable subject, because that's where parsing begins. Fail to provide a subject in a long sentence and you've created a parsing nightmare. For example:

It is mandatory that performance trends be continuously monitored and action plans implemented when negative trends are detected that could result in revenues being adversely impacted.

This sentence is a cognitive train-wreck, not because passive voice made it so, per se, but because the writer felt free to write an actor-less sentence that obeys no particular parse order. What made it possible for the writer to write an actor-free sentence? Passive voice. What made it possible for the writer to forget about parse order? Passive voice.

How can we improve the sentence? First, give it an actor. Let's use "managers." Follow up quickly with a verb (monitor) followed by an object (performance trends). Managers must monitor performance trends. Now the sentence begins to feel "self-parsing." Add the extra events: respond (to) -->trends --> (that) affect -->business. Voila! You have an easy-to-parse sentence:

Managers must monitor performance trends and respond quickly to trends that might adversely affect business.

Passive voice itself isn't evil. I like to think of it as the spike-studded doorknob on the door to evil. You have nothing to fear from a spike-studded doorknob per se. Just be careful how you use it.

Can Wikipedia be Fixed?

Why does Wikipedia have such a bad reputation?

Is it, in fact, bad? How so?

Is Wikipedia a good idea but flawed in execution? Can it be perfected? Have Wikipedia's creators done the best possible implementation of an "open encyclopedia"?

I think we all have our own answers to these (and similar) questions.

For my own part, I admit to using Wikipedia more than I'd like. I use it because it's useful. "More than I like" means I wish I had something better.

There's an uncertainty factor to Wikipedia that's unsettling. Wikipedia can't be called authoritative, in the way that Encyclopedia Brittanica could be called authoritative. Encyclopedia Brittanica wasn't perfect. But at least a user of it could rest assured that all of the entries in Encyclopedia Brittanica were written and vetted by credentialed experts.

Here's the Wikipedia Paradox: I use Wikipedia to educate myself on subjects areas in which I'm not a domain expert. But precisely because I'm not a domain expert, I'm in no position to judge the correctness of what I'm reading. This introduces unacceptable uncertainty. I can never know the degree to which something I'm reading might be accurate. The cure is for me to do more research, of course. But unless I do that every time, I'm guaranteed to misjudge the accuracy of at least some entries, some of the time. So the question is: What good is something like Wikipedia if I have to verify its correctness every time I use it?

Wikipedia's creators have recently tried to remedy the Paradox by instituting something called "featured articles." Unfortunately, it's an opaque and haphazard non-answer to the problem. Only 3,776 articles out of 4,139,639 articles on the English Wikipedia are "featured," meaning fewer than one tenth of a percent of Wikipedia articles meet "professional standards of writing, presentation, and sourcing,"

What needs to be done to make the other 99.99% of Wikipedia better? I can think of at least three things. Maybe you can add more.

1. Attribution. People need to give their names and qualifications for writing on a subject. The idea that anyone in the world can "contribute" anything at all, on any subject, to an open encyclopedia is, on the face of it, ludicrous. I want to be able to hover the mouse over a given section of text and see the authors' names, with links to their LinkedIn profiles (or other online credentials). I want to be able to see who wrote what, so I can get a feel for the possible validity of the article. In many cases, I won't care. But when I care, I really care.

2. Approval ratings. Lay readers should be asked "Did you find this article helpful?" This is trivial to do. Why isn't Wikipedia doing it? Ideally, this should be done granularly, at section or paragraph level, because we've all seen Wikipedia articles in which certain sections were well-done and others were not-so-well-done. But at least allow some level of endorsement. Right now there's nothing to tell the visitor of a given page whether the page has been deemed helpful by a plurality of viewers.

3. A transparent reputation system. Let experts endorse articles. One idea would be to correlate an article's meta-tags with an expert's "skills inventory" on LinkedIn, so that we know that (for example) an article on Prolog programming was endorsed by someone with "Prolog skills" recommendations in that person's LinkedIn skill profile. Several years ago, researchers at U.C. Santa Cruz built a consensus-based reputation engine called WikiTrust that provided visual clues (in Firefox) about author reputations whenever you browsed a Wikipedia entry. The project is no longer active, unfortunately. But it shows the kind of thing that can be done. (An interesting paper by the UCSC researchers can be found here.)

At this point, Wikipedia's founders should simply pronounce Wikipedia 1.0 an end-of-life product and begin work on Wikipedia 2.0 (if they haven't already done so). No one denies that Wikipedia 1.0 was a useful experiment. But it has reached the end of the line. Wikipedia administrators now devote more than a third of their edits to making reverts, and most usage metrics are down sharply (see this post), so it's clear something needs to be done to rescue Wikipedia from the slow death that has already begun.

Wikipedia 2.0 needs to happen fast. Let's hope the Powers That Be "get it."

Picking Up the Starfish

The flip side of capitalism.

I keep a five-dollar bill on me at all times.

Compassion comes in smaller denominations (and larger ones, to be sure). But I can't, in good conscience, carry less "spare change" on me than $5.00.

Let me tell you what typically happens to the five dollars.

I was walking down the street not long ago in a small shopping district two miles from my house, on the way from the health food store to Starbucks, when I passed a young black woman sitting on the sidewalk. The woman was wearing tattered jeans and grey tennis shoes without laces, and a hooded sweatshirt that only accentuated her gauntness. Her face was thin, cheeks slightly sunken; it was the face of an old woman and a child at the same time.

As I slowed to look at the woman, I could see that she was rocking forward and back, forward and back, like an autistic child.

While rocking, the young woman looked up at me and muttered something in a voice so soft and frail that I couldn't be sure what she was saying. As I leaned closer to hear her, she said: "Can you spare some change?"

In America, it's customary for passersby treat such people as invisible. They are the "untouchables" of American culture. Americans think of the old (now largely defunct) Indian caste system as embarrassingly barbaric and foreign, but the truth is, in the United States we have a caste system of our own, with untouchables at the bottom, just like in the British-ruled India of old, except that our Dalits, our Panchamas, our Asprushya, go by names of "homeless" and "street people."

Americans don't like to see the stark, inescapable, physical evidence of capitalism's failure, as represented by "street people," because it calls into question our most fundamental beliefs about America being a land of plenty, a land of unequaled opportunity, where hard work is always rewarded, and where (by a curious kind of inverse logic) people who sit on street corners asking for money must, by that very fact, be guilty of not working hard enough. The American Dream dictates that you are the agent of your own destiny. If you end up on the street, it is your fault.

It is considered inappropriate, in America, for ordinary people to give money to the "undeserving." The comic Louis C.K. has a comedy routine built around the inappropriateness of giving money to "street people." Louis describes the alarm that a cousin of his, who had never been to New York City, showed upon finding a disheveled homeless person sitting on the ground outside the Port Authority Bus Station. At one point, the horrified cousin leans down to say to the homeless person: "Oh my God, sir, are you okay? What happens? What happens?" Louis C.K. mockingly says: "What happens? America happens. What do you mean what happens?"

When "America happens," sometimes it's not pretty. Americans, as a rule, staunchly deny the ugly side of American life, the fact that the "American Dream" is actually an American nightmare for large numbers of people. They would prefer to wish away the existence of the 600,000 or so people who are homeless on any given day in the United States.

Americans have all kinds of lame, self-righteous excuses for not giving money to someone in obvious need of help. "He'll only use the money for drugs [or alcohol]" is one such excuse. Another popular sentiment is "That person needs to get a job," or "That person simply doesn't want to help himself." As if the disadvantaged choose their lot out of laziness. As if anyone chooses to starve to death or freeze to death on the streets of the richest country on earth.

Yet another popular excuse is: "If I give money to everybody who asks for it, I'll go broke."

That one really gets me.

There's an old story (you've probably heard it many times) about a young boy who, after a storm, finds thousands of still-alilve (but soon to be dead) starfish washed up on a beach. The boy starts throwing starfish into the water one by one. An old man happens by. Witnessing the boy's futile effort to save all the starfish, he says: "Why are you doing that?" The boy answers: "Because if I don't, these starfish will die." The old man laughs and says: "But there are thousands and thousands of starfish here. Don't you understand that what you're doing can't possibly make a difference?" Upon hearing this, the boy bends down, picks up a starfish, and hurls it into the sea. He looks at the old man and says: "I made a huge difference to that one."

Are some homeless people just lazy substance abusers looking for money to buy their next fix? Some are, certainly. One U.S. government agency estimates that 38% of homeless people are dependent on alcohol. But why did these people become dependent on alcohol? How many of them abuse alcohol because they're homeless? Will homeless alcoholics not be homeless if they stop using alcohol?

A common sight in any major
city in America.

Many studies have been done, not only in the U.S. but in other countries, of the rate of serious mental illness among the homeless. According to Stony Brook Medicine, 33% to 50% of homeless Americans have schizophrenia. The National Coalition for the Homeless puts that figure at 20% to 25% (and lumps schizophrenia together with other "severe mental illness"). But does the actual figure really matter? It's clear, even to an untrained observer, that a sizable percentage of "street people" are mentally ill.

The young woman I saw on the street that day didn't smell of alcohol. She wasn't exactly a raving lunatic, either, although I do wonder why she was rocking back and forth constantly. (It wasn't cold out. She clearly wasn't doing it to keep warm.)

Here's the bottom line. The criterion I go by when someone asks me for money is very simple. I ask myself: "Does this person look like he or she needs the five dollars more than I do?" If the answer is yes, as it invariably is, I don't lie and say "I haven't got any spare change." I don't avert my eyes like a coward. I don't ask the person how he or she will spend the money. I just give the person five dollars.

Do I feel good about doing that? Yes and no. I feel good knowing that I may have helped someone obtain a meal (or whatever it is they might have needed to get through another day). I feel bad knowing that what I just gave the person in no way "cured" his or her situation.

I only know one thing for sure. If I don't give the person the five dollars? I feel like the old man in the starfish story. I'd much rather feel like the boy.

The Stench of Turgid Prose, Part 4

Academic writing is famous for verbose, clumsy prose. In an earlier post, I showed how such prose can cost you a Nobel Prize. It's amazing to me how far scientists (and others) will go to obfuscate their own findings.

It starts while you're a grad student.

I recently came across the following paragraph in the rough draft of somebody's master's thesis in psychology.

Cultural differences are pervasive phenomena that affect individual’s cognitive processes.  The presence of cultural similarities and differences across individuals can be accessed through psychological processes such as:  logic, perception, attention, and communication. The application of these psychological processes shape the way in which individuals think and how they make decisions.

The first sentence seems to be saying that cultural differences extend to the level of individual thought, which is so obviously true (IMHO) that it doesn't need to be stated. (There's also a mechanical mistake: individual's should be individuals'.)

The second sentence seems to say that cultural differences can be assessed (not accessed) along dimensions of logic, perception, attention, and communication. I'm not sure how you "assess" these things. How do you assess communication? What does "communication" (or for that matter "attention") mean here? The author needs to add specificity to the sentence and cite references in the appropriate places, so that if the reader finds a concept obscure, he or she can consult a more detailed explanation elsewhere.

The third sentence is a mouthful. Fortunately, it's an active-voice sentence (with a predicate of "shape"). But what's the subject of the sentence? Apparently it's "The application of these psychological processes." That's a clumsy subject for any sentence. (And it's singular, not plural; therefore the verb should be "shapes," not "shape.") It's also illogical. How do you "apply" psychological processes of logic, perception, attention, and communication? It doesn't even make sense.

Suppose we simplify the third sentence to: "Such processes shape the ways individuals think and how they make decisions." Isn't it already obvious (even to a non-specialist) that logic, perception, etc. shape the way a person thinks? The sentence tells us nothing, really.

To me, the entire paragraph is useless. It says nothing useful. Rather than polish it, the author should junk it and move on.

Later in the same thesis, we encounter:

Decision making is a function of practice, motivation and cultural beliefs. The ability to resolve conflict is extremely valuable when dealing with Intercultural disputes.  Therefore, when an individual is presented with an opportunity to resolve a conflict, that individual will rely upon past experience, the motivation to make the resolution and behaviors/techniques their culture will promote or deem as acceptable socially appropriate behavior.

The first sentence is vague and just plain weird, semantically. The second sentence is self-evident and needs to be cut. The third sentence begins with "Therefore." When I see "therefore," I expect the next statement to be logical consequence of whatever was said before. That's not the case here. At least, it's not the case with regard to "past experience."

There needs to be a comma after "resolution."

The phrase "acceptable socially appropriate behavior" doesn't need "acceptable."

After "behaviors/techniques," we encounter the pronoun "they," which refers to the previous "individual." [INSERT LOUD BUZZING SOUND] Wrong. A plural pronoun does not go with a singular "individual."

The paragraph says nothing new, as far as I can tell. It needs to be trashed.

The takeaway: When you restate academic gobbledygook in simplest form, you sometimes find there's no there there. Which means the author wasn't thinking clearly.

To keep yourself from falling into this trap, always start by simplifying (even oversimplifying) what you're trying to say. Say it in plain language. Then, if it needs elaboration, go back and expand some of the ideas, but don't try to cram too much into a single sentence. Break it up. Multiple short sentences are always easier to understand than a single long sentence.

Also, be ruthlessly honest in your judgment of a paragraph. If it's junk, junk it. Don't waste time polishing a turd.

The Stench of Turgid Prose, Part 3

Today's example comes from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, a book not to be put down lightly, but (as Dorothy Parker would say) to be hurled with some force to a far corner of the room.

In Chapter 4 of The Da Vinci Code, we encounter:

Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

Do angry oxen throw their shoulders back and tuck their chins hard into their chests? Maybe. I'll have to pay more attention, next time I'm around an ox.

We know what a widow's peak looks like. Is there really any need to say "arrow-like"?

If the widow's peak preceded him like the prow of a battleship, it must have been several yards long and quite heavy.

How do eyes seem to scorch something?

What precisely is a fiery clarity?

How does a clarity (fiery or otherwise) get "radiated"?

How does a fiery clarity forecast things?

Doesn't forecast mean predict? How does a clarity make predictions?

Does severity blink? Does it unblink?

Grade: D-minus. We get that Bezu Fache is ox-like, has a widow's peak, and has dark eyes. Fair enough. But please, don't tell us about eyes that seem to scorch things while radiating clarities that predict reputations for severity.

The Stench of Turgid Prose, Part 2

In the novel Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, by Angelica Garnet, we encounter this passage:

At first his appearance was unimpressive; without being fat he was short and fairly solid, almost stocky, usually dressed in unremarkable grey tweed. It was when he was seated that one became aware of the nobility of his forehead, completed by the curve of his aquiline nose, on either side of which was a pair of shrewd, hawk-like eyes.

Ms. Garnet, why are you telling us that someone's appearance was "unimpressive"? That's an editorial judgment on your part. Show the reader what the person's appearance was. Let the reader decide if it's unimpressive. (And BTW, the semicolon is wrong. It separates two complete sentences. Make them individual sentences, or else separate them with a colon, not a semicolon.)

"Without being fat, he was short": What does short have to do with fat?

"Fairly solid"? What does "fairly" mean here? For that matter, what does solid imply, in terms of appearance? A bowl of day-old Jello is fairly solid (arguably). A piece of modeling clay is fairly solid. What does it mean for a person to be fairly solid? I get no mental image from this at all.

What is "almost stocky"? Is that like "almost pregnant"? It seems to me someone is either stocky or not stocky. Almost stocky is like saying someone is almost tall. It means nothing.

"Usually dressed in unremarkable grey tweed": Why "usually"? You're telling us how he usually dresses?

And again, Ms. Garnet, you're editorializing with "unremarkable." Why are you telling us something is unremarkable when you should be showing the reader what the guy is wearing and letting the reader decide if it's unremarkable? Doesn't grey tweed say it all? No one has ever looked at grey tweed and said "Oh my God how remarkable! Look at that! It's grey tweed!" So stop editorializing.

I don't know what a noble forehead looks like.

I also don't know how a forehead is "completed" by a curved nose. And by the way, aquiline means "curved down like an eagle’s beak." Hence to say "the curve of his aquiline nose" is the same as saying "the curve of his curved nose." Stupidly redundant.

"On either side of which was a pair of shrewd, hawk-like eyes." Let me get this straight. On either side of his nose he had a pair of eyes? Wouldn't that mean he had four eyes?

"It was when he was seated that one became aware [of his appearance]": How does a person's appearance depend on whether the person is seated or standing? Specifically, how does being seated bring out the "nobility" of a person's forehead? Isn't your forehead your forehead, whether you're seated or not?

The passage comes down to this: We see a short, stocky man in grey tweed, with hawk-like eyes and a curved nose. That's all. Anything else the author was trying to say failed miserably.

I give a failing grade to the writer, the copy editor, the acquisitions editor, and any agent that was involved in signing off on this horrendously foul-smelling bit of verbal excrement. One hopes the same stench doesn't extend to the whole book. I won't be reading it to find out.

The Stench of Turgid Prose, Part 1

In her book Elements of Fiction Writing - Beginnings, Middles & Ends, Nancy Kress cites a particularly egregious example of the kind of turgid writing that makes so many novels easily put-downable.

I feel certain that if you were to tie a prisoner of war to a chair and expose him to this sentence, you'd be committing a Geneva Convention violation of some sort:

He looked around the sparsely furnished room, spartan in decor, boasting only a dilapidated couch, a sawed-off bench, a crusty sofa, plus a few other knickknacks strewn about the otherwise bare and dusty floor.

First of all, if the room is sparsely furnished, why go on to say it's spartan in decor? Isn't that the same thing? (It's close enough that you should say one or the other. Saying both makes you look like a moron.)

Secondly, who's doing the boasting here? It could be "he" or it could be the sparsely furnished room. If it's the room, how does an inanimate object learn to boast? And if the room is spartan, what does it have to boast about?

Also, how is the sofa "crusty"? Was it beer-battered and deep-fried? Did someone order extra-crispy?

"A few other knickknacks" implies that the items listed previously were also knickknacks. How is a sofa (or a bench) a knickknack? I thought a knickknack was a curio or a tinket.

"Otherwise bare"? Why say that? You just told us the place was spartan. That means the floor is bare until proven otherwise.

So, but. How to fix this turd of a sentence? First of all, the stench of turgid prose can't be covered over with grammatical Lysol. Don't even try to polish a turd. Take it out back and bury it before it stinks up the office.

First things first. Always show, don't tell. When you tell the reader (explicitly) that the room is "sparsely furnished," that's telling. Specifying what's actually in the room is showing. Make the reader figure out that the room is sparely furnished. Say something like:

He surveyed the room. It contained a tattered sofa, a crude bench of some kind, and a spectacularly unremarkable throw rug. Plus dust. Lots of dust.

To me, "tattered" is a tad less vague (and less trite, if only slightly) than "dilapidated." I threw in the throw rug because it's something specific (rather than a bunch of nameless "knickknacks"), and just for fun I juxtaposed "spectacularly" with "unremarkable," to give the reader something to chew on. How can something be spectacular and unremarkable? Elephino. But it's more fun than just "unremarkable." Why be boring?

What if non-boringness were the main criterion for improving this passage? How creative would you be willing to get?

He coughed and winced when he entered the room. It was mostly dust, the accumulated dust of ten decades of neglect, contaminated only by a sofa, a crude benchlike thing, and several lumps on the floor.

Okay, that's over the top. But the author was clearly intent on describing a dusty, mostly empty room, remarkable for its spareness. Conceptually speaking, that's a tall order. How can a room be remarkable for what it doesn't contain?

He opened the door to the room and immediately wished he hadn't. The mere act of opening the door stirred up a blizzard of dust, an impenetrable fog of filth through which it was scarcely possible to make out the loveseat and bench that were the room's only contents.

This is far better than the original passage. We have the main character actually doing something: opening a door. We see dust not as something static (which it so often is) but as something disturbingly dynamic. "Sofa" is boring. Why not make it a loveseat? A little specificity never hurts.

Maybe there wasn't so much dust after all.

He opened the door to the room. The room was bare save for a badly discolored loveseat and a crude wooden bench that, like the broken flower vase on the floor, hid under a sad patina of dust.

All right, maybe patinas aren't sad. But you get the point. The original passage sucks major ass and can be made better with very little effort. It depends what you're trying to do. Are you trying to convey emptiness? Neglect? Loneliness? Repulsive filth? A place filled with forgotten memories? (Better get busy putting a dust-covered photograph on an end table.)

Let your imagination go bananas when writing a descriptive passage. Description is boredom, for readers, unless you go out of your way to enliven things.

Let's recap.

• Show, don't tell.
• Don't say something that's implicit in what's already been said.
• Don't commit a pathetic fallacy.
• Don't be trite.
• Don't be obscure. ("Crusty sofa.")
• Know your vocabulary. (Know what a "knickknack" is.)
• Don't be vague.
• Most of all: Don't be boring.

If you can do all that, you'll stay out of Nancy Kress's future books (and my blog), and your writing won't be the basis of any Geneva Convention violations. If you're lucky.

On Being Open-Minded

You can cling tightly to your beliefs, or you can have an open mind. Decide which you want.

Clinging tightly to a belief is not a profitable strategy for learning new things. If you must cling to a belief, cling with a child's grip.

People who cling tightly to beliefs seal off their minds to input from others. That's basically what it comes down to.

The more firm beliefs you have, the more closed-off your mind is.

Clinging tightly to a belief makes the belief religious in nature, regardless of whether it involves God or not.

What are you religious about? Perhaps it's gun control, abortion, the death penalty, patriotism ("America is the greatest country on earth"), deficit spending, taxation, evolution, global warming.

If you have religious beliefs about non-religion topics, it means you have a closed mind. Never a good idea.

Why are you defending your own religiosity? Do you not see how that makes you look? How it makes you sound?

Having religious beliefs about non-religious things is absurd.

Having religious beliefs about religious things might also be absurd. Are you even open to that possibility?

"I don't have an open mind about certain things" is the hallmark of  a stunted mind.

Everything you know is wrong until proven otherwise. Proven, as with facts. Not with beliefs.

Don't be so defensive.

Take your mind out of the root cellar and let it breathe.

If you're confident in your beliefs, you can allow fresh ideas in without being defensive.

If you feel strong emotions (like anger) when debating a given topic, you're not being rational. Just admit it. Out loud. To yourself. To others.

Get off your high horse. You don't know half as much as you think you do.

"Doctrinaire" is a variant of "jerk."

Don't be a jerk.

The Power of Simple Prose

Sixty years ago this year, Nature published a trio of landmark papers in its April 25 issue. All three were concerned with the structure of DNA, which until then had not been elucidated.

The authors of one of the papers, Watson and Crick [1], won the Nobel Prize, even though their work was based on the efforts of the authors of the other two papers.

Molecular bond structure of DNA. The
pentagonal structures are ribose
moieties. The rungs of the ladder
are purine-pyrimidine pairs.

Few people now remember the papers of Franklin [2] and Wilkins [3], whose work made possible the famous Watson and Crick paper.

Maurice Wilkins began research on the structure of DNA in 1947, at King's College, London. Rosalind Franklin moved to King's four years later to work on the same problem. There was friction, however, between Wilkins and Franklin. Ultimately, Wilkins chose to discuss his frustrations—and laboratory findings—with Cambridge University's Francis Crick and Crick's charismatic young collaborator, James Watson.

On a January 1953 visit to King's, Wilkins showed Franklin's x-ray crystallography data to Watson (without Franklin's knowledge). Rosalind Franklin's work provided incontrovertible evidence of a helical structure for DNA, although (interestingly) she herself didn't believe her results required such a structure.

After meeting with Wilkins, Watson made some quick sketches in the margin of a newspaper, which he later showed to Crick. Four weeks later, Watson and Crick proposed their now-famous model for the structure of DNA.

Ironically, neither Watson nor Crick had worked directly with DNA, and their Nobel Prize winning paper described no lab work. It contained speculations based on the experimental findings of Wilkins and Franklin, and the unpublished work of a number of others.

Rosalind Franklin, whose work
made possible the Watson and
Crick paper, died of ovarian
cancer in 1954, possibly due
to exposure to x-rays in
her laboratory.

When it came to presenting their theories, Watson and Crick had a powerful secret weapon, something completely overlooked by Wilkins and Franklin: good writing.

The Watson/Crick paper was and is a model of exemplary scientific writing. It's brief, clear, simple, and to the point. In fewer than 900 words (half the number used by either Wilkins or Franklin in their papers), Watson and Crick made clear the salient chemical and three-dimensional features of deoxyribonucleic acid, leaving no doubt as to how the double strands of DNA are held together, saying: "The novel feature of the structure is the manner in which the two chains are held together by the purine and pyrimidine bases," and "only specific pairs of bases can bond together. These pairs are: adenine (purine) with thymine (pyrimidine), and guanine (purine) with cytosine (pyrimidine)."

Franklin wrote things like:

For a smooth single-strand helix the structure factor on the nth layer line is given by:

where Jn(u) is the nth-order Bessel function of u, r is the radius of the helix, and R and ψ are the radial and azimuthal co-ordinates in reciprocal space; this expression leads to an approximately linear array of intensity maxima of the type observed, corresponding to the first maxima in the functions J1, J2, J3, etc.

Wilkins wrote things like:

Third, if the nucleotide is extended as an arc of a circle in a plane at right-angles to the helix axis, and with centre at the axis, the intensity of the system of Bessel function layer-line streaks emanating from the origin is modified owing to the phase differences of radiation from the helices drawn through each point on the nucleotide.

Franklin and Wilkins got bogged down in prolix descriptions of their laboratory findings without emphasizing, in spare and elegant fashion, the importance of their findings.

The first paragraph of the Wilkins paper has 74 words contained in three sentences. Franklin's paper starts with 110 words in six sentences. By contrast, the first paragraph of the Watson/Crick paper is just two sentences long:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

Watson and Crick thus laid the groundwork for one of the most important scientific papers of all time in just 25 words.

Watson and Crick also knew the value of short paragraphs. Their 843-word paper had 14 paragraphs, total. The papers by Franklin and Wilkins each had 18 paragraphs, but those papers had twice the word count of the Watson/Crick piece.

The secret of genetic reproduction is, of course, implicit in the double-helix structure of DNA, and one would think the implications of this might warrant special discussion in any paper announcing the breaking of the genetic code. What do Watson and Crick do? They throw in a simple one-sentence paragraph: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Talk about understated. Talk about minimalist.

Three papers; three different approaches. One Nobel Prize.

Is there any better proof of the power of simple, direct language?



References

1. Watson, J.D., Crick, F.H. A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature 1953;171:737–738.[PDF]

2. Franklin, R.E., Gosling, R.G. Molecular configuration in sodium thymonucleate. Nature 1953;171:740–741. [PDF]

3. Wilkins, M.H.F., Stokes, A.R., Wilson, H.R.. Molecular structure of deoxypentose nucleic acids. Nature 1953;171:738–740. [PDF]


If you enjoyed this post, please tweet it, blog it, or simply pass the URL on to a friend. Thanks!

Easy Rules for Improving Your Writing

Never be afraid to stomp on something to death and start over. In fact, get in the habit of doing it.

Don't keep a long, awkward sentence in hopes of reworking it. There's no sense polishing a turd.

Write multiple variations of the same sentence. Choose the best one.

Sentences that begin with a gerund (an -ing verb). Start over. Let verbs be verbs, not nouns.

Sentences that start with "There is" or use a "There is . . . that" construction: Cremate at once.

Sentences that begin with a subsidiary clause (one that doesn't contain the subject of the sentence) followed by a comma: Toxic. Keep in a sealed lead box.

Sentences in which the subject is far removed from the predicate, or located near the end of the sentence: Junk. No cash value.

Sentences that begin with an adverb or adverbial clause, followed by a comma: Seldom the best thing to do.

Sentences with more than one subserviant clause: Puts a huge workload on the reader. Chunk it up. Write it as more than one sentence.

The use of possessive pronouns (such as whose) with inanimate objects: Amateurish. Don't say "The brands whose prices are going up will be announced each week." Say: "Price increases for brands will be announced weekly."

"Effective" or "effectively": Whenever you say something like "effective marketing" (or "writing effectively") ask yourself as opposed to what? Isn't the effectiveness of what you're proposing already implied? (It sure as heck better be.)

Eliminate phrases like "the fact that" or "based on the fact that" or "due to the fact that." They're never needed. Show causality with "because" or "due to." Better yet, make causation implicit in what you're saying.

Very is overused and thus weak, not strong. Rather than strengthening something with very, you're often weakening it. Try exceedingly, extraordinarily, astonishingly, etc.

Avoid weak modifiers like "somewhat," "rather," and "fairly." Make definitive statements.

Semicolons; avoid.

Ellipses . . . ditto.

Watch out for exclamation points!

And above all, don't not avoid double negatives.
 
Tomorrow's post is special: In it, you'll see how 850 words of clear, direct prose can result in a Nobel Prize. (Yes, a Nobel Prize.) Come back tomorrow to read the whole incredible story.

On the Need for Shorter Sentences

Want to make your writing easier to read? Stay away from long sentences, and vary your sentence lengths.

The old rule of thumb about sentence length used to be: If you can't read a sentence aloud in one breath, it's too long. In my opinion (which is all that counts here; it's my blog), that rule is off by a factor of two. You should be able to read aloud any two consecutive sentences without incurring hypoxia.

You'll find it much easier to obey the out-loud rule if you simply vary your sentence lengths. After a long-ish sentence or two, give the reader a break by throwing in a shorter sentence. The shorter the better.

Also vary paragraph lengths.

Combine the two techniques (varied sentence lengths; varied paragraph lengths). Try this easy experiment: Write or rewrite a paragraph to have a super-short opening sentence (say, six words or less). Write or rewrite a paragraph (not necessarily the same one) to end on a super-short sentence. In either case, take note of the short sentence's impact relative to all the other sentences.

A good strategy for simplifying long-ish sentences is to start by eliminating "nice but not strictly necessary" words, then chunk the sentence up into single thoughts. Consider this example:

Because of the fact that a widespread practice of discrimination continues in the field of medicine, women have not at the present time achieved equality with men.

This sentence is grammatically correct. But let's face it; it sucks ass. It lacks impact and sounds like "student writing." Strip out unnecessary words ("at the present time," "because of the fact") and get right to the core meaning. Discrimination continues in medicine; that's one thought. Women have not yet achieved equality with men; that's another thought. Which is more important? To me, the key takeaway is that women have not achieved equality with men. Once somebody tells me that, I want to know why. So don't tell me the why first; tell me the what, followed by the why. "In medicine, women have yet to achieve equality with men due to widespread discrimination."

Have mercy on the reader's brain. Do some pre-parsing for your already overworked reader. For example: When you have a sentence made up of two clauses separated by a comma and a "but," consider splitting the sentence into two sentences. Let the second one begin with "But." Consider:

Statistics show that most people believe aliens have visited earth, but there is no convincing physical evidence for such a belief.

That's grammatically correct. It's also a mouthful. Try something like: "Statistics show that most people believe aliens have visited earth. But there is no convincing physical evidence for such a belief." You've saved the reader an important bit of parsing. Plus, the average sentence length is now 10.5 instead of 21.

I'm pretty sure a math geek could prove quite easily that the amount of effort required to understand a sentence grows exponentially (not linearly) with the number of words or phrases in the sentence. That's because the first thing a reader tries to do, if the sentence is non-trivial, is parse the sentence into least-ambiguous form. As sentence length grows, the number of possible parsings grows out of control because of all the possible permutations of meaning. Eventually, if the sentence gets to be long enough, the reader's head explodes. We don't want that.

January is Prevent Head Explosion Month (tell your friends), so please, do your best to simplify your prose. It's really not that hard. The alternative is a big fat bloody mess, no matter how you look at it.

Brain Anatomy and the Difficulty of Writing

I had an Aha moment the other day when I was thinking about why it is so many people consider writing difficult (often frighteningly so).

Want to see how hard it
is to overcome left-brain
language dominance? Name
the words' colors out loud
without reading the words.
This is the so-called
Stroop Effect.

The key insight: Brain anatomy is not well optimized to make good writing easy. 

We know that most of the language centers are on the left side of the brain. We also know that the left brain is where linear, logical, rule-based thinking occurs. The right brain understands less-linear things like metaphors, idioms, graphical relationships in space, and improvisation. In at least a colloquial sense, we think of the right brain as "creative."

Therefore, the difficulty of writing is partly anatomical. The brain's language centers are proximal to the rigidly logical "linear thinking" parts of the brain. If you're a computer programmer, that's a good thing. If you're trying to write poetry, it's not.

It's not impossible to trick the right brain into becoming more involved in left-brain tasks. My favorite tricks are:

Buy an Etch A Sketch.

Build a Lego puzzle.

Develop an intimate relationship with a yo-yo.

If what you're writing needs accompanying illutrations, work on the illustrations first.

Read some poetry before trying to write prose. Try some e.e. cummings.

Create a pro forma "outline" for your piece in the form of a quick doodle with lots of circles and boxes (a Venn diagram on crystal meth). I like a white-board for this, but the back of an envelope will do just as well.

Find an image that elicits a strong non-verbal reaction in you. Study it. Modify it in Photoshop.

Watch your favorite TED Talk video. Or watch a new one.

Listen to music that relies on improvisation, or at least lack of repetition. (Read up on the Mozart Effect.) My favorite musical works in this regard are the live solo performances of pianist Keith Jarrett. Most of his concert performances are pure improvisation. Some are quite abstract (think Jackson Pollock on piano). If you're not familiar with Jarrett, buy his signature Köln Concert album, and go from there.

Maybe you know of other tricks. Leave them in a Comment below. Thanks!

"Problem Words" in English and How to Use Them

I want to talk about some specific words and usage issues that cause trouble for a great many native speakers of English who should know better. Call these pet peeves, if you must. I don't like to think of them as pets, though. Savage beasts all.

Ironic means that the outcome of something had a distinct quality of unexpectedness to it. But I like to think it means something more. To me it implies that there are (or were) two possible outcomes or interpretations of something, one that's expected but turns out to be wrong, and one that's not expected but actually true. Contrast this with the word paradoxical, which (to me) implies two outcomes that seem to be at odds with one another yet are both demonstrably true. Use paradoxical when there are two true yet seemingly incompatible outcomes. Ironic is less concrete a word and not as widely understood as paradoxical.

Poignant means keenly distressing to the senses and/or arousing deep and often somber emotions. It doesn't mean bittersweet. It can be an outcome of a bittersweet situation, but by itself it does not mean bittersweet.

Decimate means to reduce by one tenth. Never use it to mean "destroy completely." Decimation was (in Roman times) the practice of killing one out of every ten mutineers (or sometimes one in ten prisoners of war), as a means of demoralizing the nine out of ten survivors. The preferred meaning of decimate remains reduction by ten percent. You can use it to mean "reduce significantly," but never use it to mean total eradication.

Irregardless is always incorrect. Use "regardless" unless you want to appear careless or stupid.

Don't say "which" when you mean "that." Example: "The subject which interests me most is philosophy." Use that, not which, in such a sentence. There's a difference between "The crane that was the cause of the accident was demolished" and "The crane, which was the cause of the accident, was demolished." Which should be reserved for clauses set off by commas.

For God's sake learn the difference between it's (a contraction) and its (possessive). The reason people get this mixed up is that the rule for making something possessive, in English, is to add apostrophe-s to the end of whatever it is. So it's natural to think that if you add apostrophe-s to "it," you get a possessive form. Not true, though. The possessive form of it is its.

Learn to use "nor" as the negative form of "or." In particular, don't use "or" in connection with "neither." Don't do: "Using ain't is neither correct or necessary." The word "neither" here demands that you use "nor."

Try not to use "almost always" or "almost never." It's semantically akin to saying "almost infinite." The words always, never, and infinite are absolute and binary. Something is infinite, or it's not. Something either occurs always, or it doesn't. "Almost" and "always" are two different concepts.

Don't say infer when you mean imply.

Bemused has nothing whatsoever to do with amusement. (Read that again.) It has everything to do with bewilderment or befuddlement.

Peruse means to read carefully, not to skim lightly or read haphazardly.

Who versus whom: My advice? Don't worry about "whom" versus "who" unless you're writing for an audience that cares about such things. It's not always better to use "whom" properly. Using it properly can mark you as a self-righteous pedant! It all depends on the audience. My rule is to always use "who" unless you're convinced the reader will object to its improper use. (And you might have noticed, I don't much care about splitting infinives.) Most readers won't care. You're writing for most readers, by the way (and not your high school English teacher), aren't you?

And finally:

Literally refers to something that actually happened (or is happening) in reality. It represents the concrete reality of something, not anything metaphoric. There's nothing speculative (nor merely descriptive) about a thing that's literal. "He literally went insane" means the person actually became clinically schizophrenic per DSM-IV-TR #295.1–295.3, 295.90. "He literally went ballistic" means the person had enough momentum to follow a ballastic trajectory through space. "He literally melted down" means the person became hot enough to exceed the melting point of his constituent materials. Don't say literally unless you really mean it.

Common Writing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

I want to talk about some tips for streamlining your writing and giving it more impact (as well as making it more "correct," grammatically). These tips address problems that even competent writers have. I catch myself making some of these mistakes. But afterward, I always discipline myself appropriately, for example by withholding extra servings of gruel.

Subject-pronoun agreement is a problem for many native speakers of English. I'm not sure why. It's easy enough to avoid. An example of what not to do: "When you ask a person to help you, they will often refuse." Why is this wrong? The pronoun "they" is a plural form, yet here it refers to a singular "person." It's correct to say: "When you ask a person to help you, he or she will often refuse." Or, if you prefer the plural: "When you ask people to help you, they will often refuse." Do one or the other. Don't mix "they" or "them" with a singular subject.

Avoid the word "very." Instead, use a higher-impact (and/or more descriptive) word like "extremely," "exceedingly," "hugely," "remarkably," "astoundingly," "astonishingly," "massively," etc. The word "very" is overused and thus has little impact. It's supposed to magnify the impact of whatever it's modifying, but you can't increase the impact of something by modifying it with a low-impact word. So just avoid "very" altogether. Think up something more imaginative. Imaginative words improve almost anybody's writing.

Eliminate unnecessary uses of "that." "He knew that it was wrong" can be improved by saying "He knew it was wrong." This may not sound like such a big deal, but if you use "that" needlessly throughout a lengthy piece of writing, you'll find it tends to bog things down. If you're looking for a super-easy way to streamline your writing, start by finding and removing unnecessary thats.

Stay away from "There is...that" constructions. Don't do this: "There are many cars that aren't reliable." Instead say: "Many cars aren't reliable." Why would you want to use seven words to say something that can be said in four words?

Don't put an "-ing" word at the start of a sentence, unless you really know what you're doing. In English, an "-ing" word is (grammatically speaking) either a present participle or a gerund. The difference between a participle and a gerund is that a participle is a verb form used as an adjective, whereas a gerund is an "-ing" verb that serves as a noun. Either way, the brain rebels. Your brain doesn't want to see verbs used as adjectives (nor as nouns). So avoid "-ing" verbs wherever you can. Sometimes you can't avoid them, of course. "Revolving door" uses the participle "revolving" to modify "door," which is fine; the meaning is clear. "Interrupting is rude" uses the gerund "interrupting" as the subject of the sentence. Not bad; it's short, and the brain can parse it okay. But consider: "Paying attention to grammar eliminates mistakes." That's a poor sentence (what's the subject?), as is "Being thin avoids heart disease later in life." Stay with nouns as the subjects of sentences and you'll find that sentences are easier to write, as well as easier for the reader to understand.

Be careful about decoupling the object of a sentence from the predicate. Example of what not to do: "Throw the horse over the fence some hay." The subject of this sentence is an implied "you," the object is "hay," and the predicate is "throw." But that's not how the sentence reads. It reads as if "horse" is the object, which is wrong. Presumably, you want to throw hay, not a horse, over the fence. If you were to say "Throw hay to the horse over the fence," that's still not good, because you're implying that the horse is over the fence rather than that you need to throw hay over the fence. If you actually want somebody to throw hay over the fence, say so: "Throw hay over the fence, to [or for] the horse."

Don't let ambiguity creep into your writing. "The ability to read quickly made him smarter." Does "quickly" modify "made" (quickly made)? Or does it modify "read" (read quickly)? It's ambiguous. Completely reword the sentence if necessary. Try something like "He became smarter because of his ability to read quickly," or (if "quickly" applies to "made") "He quickly became smarter because of his ability to read." Say things in the most unambiguous way possible, even if it means making sentences longer.

And by the way: Much of the time, you can ignore the old rule about not allowing a sentence to end with a preposition. Examples: "That's a subject I know nothing about." "It's nothing to cry over." "That's what the dog sat on." "Do it that way, if you have to." No one but the most pedantic schoolmarm would consider such sentences wrong.

Tomorrow, I want to talk about certain words and usages that cause trouble (yet are easily made right). The words in question are like land-mines waiting to blow big craters in your writing. Ignore them at your own peril.

Writer's Block: Getting Past the First Sentence

Suppose you have a writing assignment to do and it's due tomorrow and you're completely blocked. You don't even know where to begin.

Here's how to get started.

First, accept the general strategy that you're going to produce crap first, then make something out of it later. Because that's how writing works, frankly. Everything you've ever read in print started out as something way crappier than what finally got published. Most of what passes for "writing skill" is actually revision skill.

Secondly, forget about rules. Drop all your inhibitions over grammar, syntax, spelling, vocabulary, use of pronouns (first person, second person, third person), etc., because all that stuff can be fixed later. If you have a brief (80,000-foot-level) outline, fine, but for now take it off the table and hide it somewhere.

Start by writing the following sentence: "The most important thing I'd like to say about [subject] is XYZ." (Fill in the subject and XYZ yourself.)

Again, don't fuss over the fact that you're using first person voice ("I'd like to say"), because that's easily fixed later. There are hundreds of ways to fix it. Here's one: "There are lots of ways to look at [subject]. But probably the single most important thing to note about it is XYZ." Here's another: "Most people think ABC about [subject]. But in fact there are many reasons to take the XYZ point of view. A quick review of the evidence will show why DEF might well be a more worthwhile way to understand [subject]." You can always take yourself out of the discussion. Do it later.

Okay, you've written something, so congratulate yourself. The thing to notice is that once you've captured your main idea in a few words, you can now move in one of two directions. It may well be that your most important point is something you can only get to after first addressing a bunch of other things. In that case, move up to the top of the page (above the sentence you just wrote) and plan on writing downward, until you get to your most important point.

The other way it could go is that once you've stated your most important point, you need to back it up with examples and/or discuss important sub-points. In that case, start writing a new paragraph below the sentence you just wrote and plan on continuing downward toward the bottom of the page.

In one case you're moving toward the main point from above; in the other case you're moving from the main point downward. It may well be that you end up having to do both. But the point is, you've driven a stake into the ground. You have a reference point to work away from, or work toward.

Don't be afraid to state your conclusion first (at the very top of your piece), then, in the next paragraph, back up and explain how you got there. When I feel it's going to take a lot of difficult setup to get to my main point (and then I get all constipated-feeling, because I know the backstory is going to require a ton of well-thought-out explanation), I shortcut the whole process by stating my "punchline" early on, usually in the second paragraph. The first paragraph will state what it is I want to talk about and perhaps give some bullshit justification for why it needs to be talked about. Then, right away, in the second paragraph, I'll say something like "Rather than draw this out, let's cut to the chase. The right way to approach a problem like XYZ is to think about it in terms of ABC." Then I spend the rest of the piece supporting my already-delivered "punchline."

So give yourself permission to introduce topics in any order, including conclusion-first.

It may sound simplistic, but the most important thing you can do when you're blocked is just write something. Laugh, resign yourself to the idea that you're going to produce utter crap, then do just that: Quickly write down a big long list of absurdly simplistic statements about your topic. Or just write a laughably bad first paragraph and pretend you just discovered it under a stack of papers in a mental hospital. Laugh at it. Then move on.