writing

Most people “write badly because they cannot think clearly,” observed H. L. Mencken.

A larger reason is that writing — of fiction, “creative non-fiction,” and memoir — has become something like a collaborative process in this century, as have other activities once done singly and by the seat of one’s personal pants (raising children, dressing for work, liking and disliking things).

So perhaps our teaching (online and off) should be seen — and is generally taken — not as the passing of truths de haut en bas but as just one part of a fruitful or at least hopeful collaboration.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers examined 65,000 dissertations. They defined three types of jargon — linguistic complexity, acronyms, and legalese — and screened the titles for it, weeding out technical language and slang. The researchers then cross-referenced the students' universities with U.S. News & World Report rankings and found a

Years ago scientists thought our brains decoded words as symbols. Now we understand that our neurons actually “embody” what the words mean: When we hear more-specific ones, we “taste,” “feel,” and “see” traces of the real thing.

Remarkably, the simulation may extend to our muscles too. When a team led by an Italian researcher, Marco Tettamanti,

You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: “No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.”

And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.

Study participants were asked to present an entrepreneurial idea. Some were told they would be competing against famous alumni or MBA graduates. And in those instances, Galinsky found the study subjects were more likely to present a pitch that contained more jargon. Similar results occurred in the study when they observed conversations between two

Winston Churchill knew this deeply. “The shorter words,” he says, “are usually the more ancient”. And “they appeal with greater force to simple understandings than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek”.

Causality might sound like basic common sense, but Saunders says two things tend to separate writers who publish from those who don’t: 1) A willingness to revise 2) The ability to create causality. Causation is to stories, he writes, as melody is to songs.