Public intellectual Steven Pinker has a new book approaching, a psychological study of the process of writing called The Sense of Style. And it sounds fascinating:
The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is “cognitively unnatural”. For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You cant see your readers facial expressions. They cant ask for clarification. Often, you dont know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this?
Pinkers answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach “joint attention”. Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone elses attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? “When you write,” Pinker says, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world thats interesting, and that youre directing the attention of your reader to that thing.”
That sets off about a million thoughts in my head, but it’s too late to write them down tonight. What do you think?