tonight. >> next summer harvard university's himelfarb two, author of trade author of "the sense of style," discusses how to improve the quality of our writing. professor pinker says while texting and the internet are putting for developing bad writing habits, writing well has always been a difficult task. the event was held at barnes & noble booksellers in new york city. it is just over an hour. >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to barnes & noble. i am pleased to welcome tonight's guest, professor steven pinker from the department of psychology at harvard here to introduce his new book, "the sense of style" -- "the sense of style" on trade "the sense of style: the thinking person's guide to writing in the 21st century." it has garnered multiple accolades among them he was being named foreign-policy list of 100 global thinkers in times the hundred most influential people in the world today. please join me in welcoming steven pinker and "the sense of style." >> thank you. why is so much writing so back? how can we make it better? and why do we have to decipher so much legalese like the revocation by these regulations of the previously revoked subject to savings does not affect to be continued operations. why do we have to endure so like it is a moment of non-construction, disclosing the application of actuality from the con that imparts you emphasize in the helplessness of the ineffectuality. why's it so hard to set the time on a digital alarm clock? well, there is no shortage of areas in the most popular one is captured in this cartoon for the tech writer, good starr, meets more gibberish. in other words, bad writing is a deliberate choice. bureaucrats insist on gibberish to evade responsibility. hasty face nerds get their revenge on girls he turned them down for dates in the jocks to kick sand in their faces. pseudo-intellectuals try to bamboozle readers for highfalutin gobbledygook on the concealing the fact they have nothing to say. i think there's a problem with this theory, though no doubt it applies to some writers some of the time. but in my experience i know plenty of scholars and scientists to do groundbreaking work on import subjects that have no need to impress and do nothing to hide. still, they're writing stinks. good people can write bad throws. the other popular theory is that digital media that are ruining the language. google is making us stupid. stupefy us americans and objects are fever. twitter is making us think and write in 140 years. i think the dumbest generation theory makes a prediction that it was much better before the digital age. those of you who were around in the 1980s remember what it was like in that decade. that was a decade in which teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs. bureaucrats wrote in clear prose. every academic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay. you remember those days, don't you? or was it the 70s? in the thing is bad throws has burdened us in every era. in 1961, they were saying recent graduates including those that the university agree seems to have no mastery of the language at all. maybe it was better earlier in the 20th century before the advent of television and radio mike in 1917 when every college in the country close our freshman can't spell, can't punctuate. its pupils are so ignorant of the nearest rudiments. maybe go back even further like the 18th century home for a language is degenerating very fast. i begin to fear will be impossible to check it. and then there are the police who said for crying out loud you never end a sentence with a little birdie. [laughter] a better theory is inspired by one of my favorite things by charles darwin that man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the battle of our young children for no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brutal or write. speech is instinctive. writing is and always has been hard to leader is a note invisible, inscrutable. they insist only the writer's imagination. the reader can't break in a reactor asked for clarification. so writing is an active pretense and writing is an act of craftsmanship. well, classic rose gives the reader credit for knowing they are hard to define in many controversies are hard to resolve. demeter is there there to see what that will do about it. another corollary is to minimize the reflexive hedging that many scholars engage in. the drizzling of prose with fluffy modifiers like nearly come to seemingly come comparatively, to some extent, so to speak and presumedly, which means they don't really mean what they are saying. similarly, many academics shudder quotes. i will give you an example of a sentence that does both. this comes from a letter of recommendation i read for michigan graduate school. a quick study has been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her. are we supposed to understand this is saying this young woman is a quick study? or she is a quick study, namely someone who is rumored or alleged to be a quick study but really isn't. virtually any area means there are some areas where she tried to educate herself but failed. the youth of these hedges is so reflects us, so ingrained among many scholars that at one point i met an eminent scientist and i asked her how she was here she pulled out a picture of her 4-year-old daughter and she deemed we virtually adore her. why is there so much compulsive hedging in academia and also other kinds of rational needs? to follow the inheritance that bureaucrats abbreviates cya, cover your anatomy. and there is an alternative. alternative, tsutsumi. you state what you mean and you count on the ordinary charity of conversation that we all engage in to make conversation possible. so if someone says that they want to move out of seattle because it is a rainy city, you don't interpret them as meaning that every seattle 24 hours a day seven days a week, 52 weeks the year. automatically you interpret it as relatively or somewhat rainy. so you can count on not in writing classic prose. a second major implication is that has to keep that the illusion that the reader is seeing the world while they're listening to verbiage. that illusion can be shattered when a writer writes in clichés, leading to the familiar advice, avoid clichés like the plague. so the kind of writer who writes we needed to get the ball rolling in our search for the holy grail fabulous and very magical door slam dunk, so he wrote the punches and let the chips fall where they may well seem the glass is half full, which is easier said than done. as you process this prose, you clearly have to turn off your visual cortex aroused to get one ludicrous after another, especially since the overuse of clichés will inevitably lead writers to mix their metaphors as in another sentence from the letter of recommendation i received the renaissance man drilling down to the core issues and pushing the envelope. not sure how you can do all three of those at the same time. when no one has yet invented a. [laughter] related hazard writing in clichés or at least not thinking of the visual content of what you write is that you'd be eligible for membership in american to figuratively used literally. there is nothing wrong with saying she literally blushed. it is not good to say she literally exploded in very, very bad to say she literally emasculated. [laughter] a third is about the world. not about the conceptual tools with which we understand the world. therefore calls for minimizing the use of concepts. concepts about other concepts in framework issue model, roll strategy, tendency and anyone who has read your project or academic prose is all too familiar with these filler words. or example, from an editorial "new york times" legal scholar who wrote i had the restart to amend constitution would work on an actual level. on the aspirational level however, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable, which means i doubt they're trying to amend the constitution would actually succeed him up it may be to aspire to it. or it is important to approach the subject of a variety of strategies including the mental health assistance but also from a law enforcement perspective to which we need to consult psychiatrists, but we may also have to inform the police. classic prose narrates ongoing event. we see agents performing actions that affect objects. non-classic prose signifies events and then refers to them, using a pernicious grammatical process called nominal efficient, churning something into a noun or a name. so instead of talking about someone appearing, you see they make an appearance. instead of organizing something can be bring about the organization of that scene. in the english scholar called the zombie nouns because they leapt across the stage without any conscious agent direct in their motion. they can turn prose into a night of the living dead. examples. from an experimental paper, participants read assertions because veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word, which means people i sentence on the screen followed by the word true or false. [laughter] subjects are tested under good to excellent acoustic isolation to which we tested the students in a quiet room. [laughter] these semantic concepts in zombie nouns has become such a signature that everyone can recognize the humor behind this editorial cartoon from tom tolls, graybearded academician with the global s.a.t. scores are at an all-time low. incomplete implementation of strategized programmatic designated to maximize awareness and utilization of communication skills with the standardize review and assessment of one/null development. any interrogatory verbalization's? it is not just academics who are captive by zombie nouns. it's also politicians as when governor rick perry at texas said right now there is not an anticipation that there will be a cancellation. that is right and we don't anticipate that we will have to kill you. and corporate consultant as in the man who explained what he did for a living by saying i'm a discipline social media strategisstrategis t. i kubler programs, products and strategies to corporate clients across a spectrum of two medications unction and the journalists pressed to explain what that means coming he finally confessed i teach the companies. product engineers used to be that if you would ride a consumer product like a portable generator, mild exposure over time from extreme exposure may rapidly be fatal without reducing significant warning symptoms. well, turns out hundreds of people succeeded themselves every year by using portable generators indoors. so they change the sticker to read using a generator indoors can kill you in minutes. that is classic style and what it means is non-classic style can lead really be a matter of life and death. yet literally be a matter of life and death. i promise that a better understanding of the design of language can lead to sounder writing it dies. how might that work? let's take another contributor to zombie prose, the passive voice, the difference between the dog and demand, the active voice in the man whose bitten by the dog in the passive voice. it is well-known that the passive is overused by academics. on the basis of the analysis made of the data which recollect david is a suggestion that null hypothesis can be rejected. and lawyers of the outstanding balances repaid in full, the unearned finance charge will be refunded to the passage in a row and political officials may all recognize the recently resigned director of the secret service, julia pierson who in trying to explain how it is that on her watch an armed intruder with the sense to the white house sprinted across the lawn, manage to get into the white house armed with a knife before he was finally tackled while she said the stakes were made. what members called the evasive passes. accordingly, all the classic style guides advise against using the voice. use the active voice. the active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive. many sentences can be made lightly and emphatic by substituting the active voice for some expression on his there is or could be heard. if you notice something about this advice, it uses the passive voice to tell people not to use the passive voice. similarly, the other iconic hottie of advice for writing handed out to every college freshman is george orwell's politics and the english language in which he says a mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is most marked characteristic of modern english prose. i list are expanding to which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged. wherever possibly used in preference to the act is, which contains not one, but two examples of the passive voice. the passive voice and for that matter, any english construction could not have survived in the language for 1500 years unless it was doing something useful. indeed as these two bits of self-contradictory advice remind us, we really can't do without it. why is that? to understand it, you have to think about the design of language, how language works. and in that shell, language can be thought of as an african web of knowledge into a string of words. the writer's knowledge is what cognitive psychologists model is a semantic network. you can think of it as a mind wide web. this is a simplified portion of the person's knowledge of the tragedy of edifice rex has brought to life by police. it has a number of com to send images and melody, all interconnect did by bosco relations. your mind can flip from concept to come to in pretty much the order. when it comes time to share a chunk of this network with another person, you've got to converted into a sentence. what is a sentence? it is a linear string of words. at his face married his mother and killed his father. one word after another. this means there is an inherent problem in the design of language. the order of words in a sentence has to do two things at once. on one hand it serves as the meaning that indicates who did what to whom. at the same time, it necessarily present some information to the reader before others and does the fact that the information is absorbed into the mind of the reader. the early material in the sentences the sentence topic that refers to what the leader is looking at. it's the giving information because it gives back to what the reader is already thinking about. the later material in a sentence presents the new imation. it is analogous to what you notice once you are looking at a particular direction. any prose that violates these principles will have a feeling of being choppy or disjointed or incoherent. enter the passive voice. the passive is a work around for this flaw or defined contradiction and language. it allows writers to contain the same semantic information, namely who did what to whom. but while flipping the surface order in particular it allows the writer to start the sentence and that is why it is bad advice. it is actually the better construction when the dads who is currently the focus of the reader's mental. i will go with an example. i am going to give you a passage from the wikipedia entry for edifice rex, which describes the epiphany that begins the climax of the play. spoiler alert. a messenger arrives. formally a shepherd on mount kiper ratted during that time was given a baby. the baby was given to him by another shepherd from the household would've been told to get rid of the child. they notice that it's pretty understandable passage has three constructions in a row. first i is there on the messenger. the first sentence as a messenger arrives. so the messenger is the subject of the sentence. he was given a baby. and our eyes are on the baby and so the next sentence uses a sentence uses the password the baby is the subject. the baby was given to the messenger by another shepherd. now our eyes are on the other shepherd and so he is the subject of the sentence. the other shepherd had been told to get rid of the child. that is why this passage is reasonably easy-to-follow. imagine the writer had followed the advice, cumbre passes to act. a messenger arrives and emerges that he is firmly shepherd on mount kiper ron and during that time someone gave him a baby. another household and someone had told to get rid of the child gave the baby to have. this is much harder to follow because you feel like you are at a tennis match looking back and forth at the different participants. a well-crafted passages like the careful choice of camera angles by a cinematographer and the passive is one of the means by which that can be accomplished. it provides writers with constructions that varies the order of the string of words while preserving the meaning, you could write at this giveaway is, latest discovery at a phase ended with additives who killed leah's and so on. and the challenge for writers is to choose the construction that introduces ideas to the reader in the order in which you can rest absorbed them. this does bring up the question of why the passage is so common in bad writing, which it indeed is. the reason is good writers narrate a story, which is advanced by protagonists who make things happen. bad writers work backward from their own knowledge, just writing down ideas in the order in which they occur. the writer knows how the story turned out, so the writer begins with the outcome of events in prison that causes an afterthought in the passive voice makes that all too easy. bad habit of writers leads to the third part of his talk on enabling why is it so hard for writers to use language to come a ideas. the best explanation that i know of is a phenomenon in the college called the curse of knowledge. the curse of knowledge works as follows. when you know something, it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine what late for someone else not to know it. also called mind blowing a scummy egocentrism, hindsight bias in half a dozen other phenomenon. a classic experimental illustration is a study done on three year old children to any developmental psychology's events. a 3-year-old comes into the lab. you give them a box of m&ms. he opens the box and is surprised to find britain's type. see that the ribbons back in the box, close to death. now a new child comes to the lab and you asked the boy, what does jason think is in the box? the child will say rude bins, even though jason has no way of knowing the box contains ribbons. and he can't help but think everyone else knows it too. what did you think was in the box when you came into the lab? the child will save ribbons. are now adults course outgrow this kind of error, kind of. it has many studies have shown that adults are prone to a version of the same impairment if a person knows the meaning of an obscure word, they assume everyone else knows it. if they know a fact, they assume other people know it. if they know how to use a cell phone that they can learn quickly as well. the chief contributor to opaque writing. they spell out the abbreviations to find the technical terms what the jargon to use concrete language that allows the reader to imagine something those two abstractions meaningless to the reader. and as you become and develop expertise in a subject. you start it larger and larger bodies of information. the cognitive psychologists call a chunk. you can label the phrasing calls to mind in an instant. undoubtedly possible. someone who has not undergone the same history of chunking. so imagine as an example of phenomenon i just explained, namely people have trouble imagining the curse of knowledge so likewise i describe the experiment of psychologists call the false belief task, a phrase that refers to a complicated scenario. then the expert will tend to refer to the event with the label for the chunk, forgetting that readers never underwent same learning process. so if i were to explain how the knowledge bleeds too bad writing by suffering from the curse of knowledge in similar behavior in the false belief task, i know what i'm talking about and people forget to explain it. you have no idea what i'm talking about. they have to use tactical vocabulary to their peers, articles in my own field, i find utterly incomprehensible. for example, a general trends in cognitive science written for the links of me, which the doctors explained and is confirmed and the stimulus is ultimately perceived as influenced by posting less events arriving several hundreds of milliseconds after the original stimulus. authors assume that the rapid aleutian and i've been in the business for 40 years and i've never heard of it. likewise, they assume it is obvious with the stimulus is that what perceived is and so on. i vaguely nodded as i read this, but i didn't claim to understand it. looked at my shelves, found that there is a phenomenon called the cutaneous rabbit version that works as follows. you have someone close their eyes and you tap them three times on the wrist, three times on the elbow, three times on the shoulder and it feels to them like a series of tasks running is there, kind of like a hopping rabbit. the significance is whether early tasks were felled depends on where the later town square. subconsciousness doesn't unfold in real-time, but it's kind of edited retroactively. there is nothing that is more precise than scientific or breaker is about a stimulus compared to a tap on the wrist or a post-stimulus event to a tap on the elbow. indeed, less vigorous than less weight because it is in no position into ss whether this does show that conscious perception is slower integrative, whereas if you know what actually happened, which you would know is expressed in concrete plain english, then you would be in a position to evaluate it. my favorite illustration of the general phenomenon comes from an old joke in which a man goes into the dining room of a resort and he sees a bunch of retired comedians sitting around a table. he joined sandman one of them says 117. and then the rest of them burst out in uproarious laughter. another says 36. again, general hilarity. so he asks the guy next to them, what is going on here? these old-timers have been around each other so long that they all know the same jokes. to save time they give each joke the number and then they don't have to tell the joke here they just recite the number. that's ingenious. let me try it. so he says 47. 112. everyone stared at him. he sinks back into his seat and asked, what did i do wrong? it's all in the way you tell it. that is an illustration of the curse of knowledge. how do you exercise the curse of knowledge? traditional advice is to keep in mind the reader over your shoulder, trying to imagine what readers know and don't know. the problem with the traditional solution is we are not very good at guessing other people's knowledge. we do not have the gift of clairvoyance, even we try hard to what we are not so good at it and we are deluded about how much we really can't answer about other people's knowledge. but at least it's a start. i'm talking to you. your readers know less than you think they do and the less you try to imagine what they now come and work your tea to confuse and. a better solution is to show a draft to a real reader and see if they could follow it. you'll often find that what is obvious to you is not obvious to anyone else. in addition, shelley draftee yourself after enough time has passed that it isn't a millionaire. if you are like me and rereading your first start on the look that we find yourself saying, what did i mean by that? this doesn't at all to often who wrote this graft? most advice should be sought as i said by us on revise, not how to write because the order in nature of bush thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the way of which they are best to abide a reader. finally, how do we think about correct usage? probably the aspect of writing that gets the most attention. whenever he speak about writing on the radio and the collins, the switchboards always right at the people's' piece about incorrect usage. it is clear that there are some usages that are obviously wrong. when cookie monster says me want cookie, the humor appreciated even by a child comes from the fact that we all, including children and realized that cookie monster has made a grammatical error. again, cheeseburger. it would not be funny to the extent that it is unless we all recognize that cats don't speak in grammatical english. it is our children learning. even former president george w. bush acknowledge that this was an error in a self-deprecating speech in which he went over a number of his grammatical gaffes. there are others that are not so clear. just to be nonpartisan, former president bill clinton, a demo crack running for president, one of the taglines was give us a chance to bring america back, which many sticklers contains a grammatical error. the infamous between uni error. another democratic resident, barack obama that members of the gotcha game. the singular error and it seems to singular no american. to go where no man has gone before. is this a grammatical error? the slight incentive would say so. you think you lost your love. i saw her yesterday. if you she's thinking of and she told me what to say. this is a preposition at the end of the sentence in a grammatical president would say they ought to have you of whom she is thinking. and then there is the articulate 1970s cavett who recently wrote an article for "the new york times," speaking of college reunion in which checking in the hotel was nice to see a few of my old classmates in the lobby. anyone? dangling modifier or participle clearly went to school before the 1960s. usages like this. it has led to what journalists call the language of war. according to which there are two different approaches to usage. there are the prescriptive s. and the descriptiveness. they prescribe how people ought to speak. their position can be summarized that will usage are objectively correct to obey them is to uphold standards of excellence, to flood the mr. down culture and hastening decline of civilization. no joke, they actually say this. the descriptiveness describe how people do speak and their position according to the dichotomy can be summed up as rules of usage are the secret handshake of the ruling class. the people should be liberated to write however they please. i think there are a lot of reasons to think that the language war is a pseudo-controversy idowu over 60 years ago. the prescriptive s. what has the view of whom she's thinking and the descriptiveness would find clearly we need a better way of thinking about thinking of usage. what are rules of usage. they are not an object of fact about the world scientists allowed him and. there's my nonlogical or mathematical truths that you could is ayers tabulated governing bodies. i'm sure the usage panel of the dictionary and the first thing i did when they signed me up is we asked how do you guys and they say we have pay attention to the way we use words. is no one in charge. lunatics are running the asylum. action areas do not consist of experts to meet around a table once a year and stipulate what is correct or incorrect. it's not like the rules committee of major league baseball, but rather they codify the crack says of current speakers of english. the way to think about rules of usage than if they are tacit evolving convention. a convention is no advantage other than the fact that everyone else does it the same way. tapir currency is an obvious example. the green piece of paper other than the fact other than that on all streets as if it was valuable. but there is a dream to drive on one side or the other. i've been listening to the radio. driving on the wrong side of the freeway. one maniac? there's hundreds of them. a night paper currency the law of which side of the street to drive on his tacit. it emerges as a rough consensus within a virtual community of careful writers, without explicit collaboration agreement or legislation and its evolving. this rough consensus inevitably changes over time. well, what should a writer do? user is the rules of usage should be evaluated of. others are. a clear case in which one should follow the rules when it simply extends log to every cases. so why do all of us, including george w. bush agree that is our children learning violates the rule. it is because it is simply an inverted version of our children is learning another one rocket nice that is ungrammatical. therefore, the consistency that would say the children learning is also ungrammatical. for the impact of not itself yet can easily glide past the readers eye. though when you think about it, you really should be the writer here was misread whereas the subject is actually the singular word impact. you can simply take out the intervening words and get the impact in error. the impacts of the card has not been felt yet. by the way, many of you might recognize the infamous green wiggly line. i'm majority of the lines side agreement errors like this that may have escaped the eye of the writer about which they make important semantic extensions. they do not make the same thing and if you use -- you think is a fancy-schmancy synonym, you might get into trouble. also means excessively flattering, insincere and so with you thank someone for their latter for their fulsome introduction, you will be insulting that person and yourself. likewise to call something simplistic is not the same as calling it simple. calling the cisco might be a complement kid calling a simplistic be an insult, excessively simple or naïve. fortunate in for two it is among careful writers. you can look it up and find out why. the general rule the same route in different suffixes avoid a surrounding hoity-toity by using a highfalutin word as a more posh urchin of a simple words. this is another case that it doesn't make sense to obey the prescriptive rules in order to meet the expectations of your readership. otherwise, you might be subject to the declaration in the princess bride after the cd repeatedly used the word inconceivable to refer to things that just happened. you keep using that word. i do not think it means what you think it means. on the other hand, not every bit of grammatical folklore or thinly remembered less and from the classroom is a legitimate role of usage. many of the alleged rules out there in fact violate grammatical logic are routinely flouted by the best writers have always been flooded by the best writers. a prime example calling everyone loves jane austen, the english scholar documents the singular no fewer than 87 times in her prose. likewise split infinitives between you and i., all the best writers in the history of english literature has used them. indeed, it is not only unnecessary to obey many of the rules that are floating out there, but it can actually make it worse. for example, take is that even a harvard press release and the david rockefeller/$102 to increased romantic learning opportunities for harvard undergraduates. i don't know what i push this is, but it is in english years the writer tries so hard to avoid that he moved dramatically after the verb and resulted in something close to gibberish. even more dramatically in january 2009, as chief justice john roberts, who is a notorious stickler for grammar with administering the oath of office, the oath of office according to the constitution reads as follows. i barack obama do solemnly swear that i will faithfully execute the office of president of the united states. while administering the oath, changed it to i barack obama do solemnly swear that i will execute the office of president of the united states faithfully. either way, this is not an improvement in terms of prose style. its desperate attempt to avoid a split her and also called into question legitimacy of the transition of power. and so they had to repeat the oath of office in a private ceremony later that afternoon. he thought the burgers would cause trouble, just imagine if barack obama had never been administered the exact wording of the oath of office. this is the kind of mischief that can resolve if you take many of these rules too seriously. how should a reader distinguish legitimate -- a writer distinguish legitimate roles of usage from the focus on? the answer is unbelievably simple. look them up. modern dictionaries and style manuals will not back up any cockamamie theory, rumor, superstition folklore that the various purists will throw at you. because modern dictionaries and style manuals actually pay close attention to the weight and bush actually is written. they are evidence based. if you look up the infinitives in the other dictionary, if the infinitives in the interest of clarity and the usual reason for splitting, this leave the conflict that whenever you need to. heritage dictionary, the only rationale for having the distraction based on an analogy with latin in general the usage panel accepts the infinitives. and carter, random house, it better, and better, you cannot find a reputable guide on file that actually says don't split infinitives yet everyone takes that somewhere someone wrote down the rule. so in fact it's not only split infinitives, but look it up. dictionaries do not bid by physicians at the end of sentences come of sentences, gameplay modifiers and the one. it is difference between recent evidence-based usage advice versus smarty-pants one upmanship in a lot of advice on grammar consists of one of them should. correct usage should be kept in use. it is well worth inattention to, but it's the lease important part of good writing. you can obey every rumored for alleged rule of usage and still write lousy prose. it's far less important in classic style and overcoming the knowledge to say nothing of actual diligence incoherent ideas. even the most errors, the ones that really make your skin crawl are not signs of the decline of language to say nothing of civilization is the web, and best-selling author showed in his ex-case, neck, he imagines a purists be visited by a ghost who brings a cautionary vision of things to calm. this is the future. and this is the future if you give up the fight over the word literally. and yes, they are exactly the same. surely some otterman wessex in times provide better ways of enhancing our prose. the indication of the classic kind of language in the window to the world and understanding language works in the means of converting a web of thought into a string of words, a diagnosis of why good prose is so hard to write, mainly the curse of knowledge in a way to make sense of rules and correct usage, namely as tacit evolving conventions. any interrogatory verbalization's? thank you. [applause] >> okay, we've got a guy with a boom microphone that will find the questioners. just wait a second until the microphone is here. >> the other question i [inaudible] >> you get a very great example of this than two and who should be outside. but it does actually -- you mentioned or you say that some american had this crazy idea. but actually considering how we talk about design language, figuratively, the design of the language argues would really hang but mark. it is all in the margin. that's for visual reasons. it is not logical inspectional eight. that's all i'm saying. >> what you are referring to is the american-style is. this is not followed in the united kingdom in which it is presented ends with quoted material, then american practices to put the. or, inside the quotation marks rather than outside. so if you say he called her a quote quick study, unquote, the. goes before the quotation mark in the united states. this sticks in the craw of everyone's list and computer scientists because it is patently illogical. the quoted material is a part of the sentence in the full text demarcates the end of the error. putting them in that order is like superman's famous wardrobe malfunction in which he wears his underwear outside his hands. [inaudible] >> it could be. it makes sense. the rationale is visible, namely someone decided that it looks better not to have it. with all of that out there with all that white space around it. it looks better if you have grown up getting used to it. it is not so clear that in the u.k. where they've done perfectly well with the logical punctuation that it ever pops out to them. in fact, in certain platforms, most notably wikipedia, the is to use the logical punctuation or the english style with it. further, goes inside the quotation marks. the question is, does it -- it doesn't look ugly when you have to. outside the quotation mark it i suspect people would even notice. if you are a trained typographer, if you live in the world of type, i can maybe see the aesthetics, although even i wonder if it lifetime of having it that way. it is not that one would necessarinecessari ly want to tolerate the logic of it. i'm not going to be able to change in their part is single-handedly. the example that you referred to from an article called punctuation and human freedom i just repoll up, the british linguistic came up with examples in which the american practice makes it impossible to express certain precise thought. so he called for a campaign of civil disobedience. if i your copy editors, then this was almost 30 years before wikipedia actually followed as part is. but anyway, you are correct in noting that this bit of illogic is done for aesthetic reasons rather than grammatical logic. many examples i talk about in punctuation where i note that many errors that seem to betray a writer being illiterate don't come from a lack of logic. on the contrary, they come for being too logical. while betraying a lack of attention to details of the printed page. things like using the so-called grocer's apostrophe, like apple's 99 cents each for apples is still apple apostrophe s. that is actually pretty logical, but that is not the way it is done. or it is a right edge, where it has the apostrophe as. that is extremely logical. but again, we just don't do it that way. if you are a careful writer, you have to pay enough attention to the details that you remember that our illogic and this is another one. yes, dear the question? >> i'm a high school industry and a lot of my students and based in our department and one side of the debate is to say the teachings he did and the structure, so if i'm trying to explain to my students why they've constructed it incorrectly, i can use certain kinds of jargon so that i can print after them. the other side of the debate is that it's kind of a colonial, pedantic activity. .. and i'm loath to admit it because i like the idea of teaching grammar, and in one of the chapters of the book i kind of tried reply the lost art of diagramming sentences. not with the kellogg notation that was taught from the 1890s to the 1960s, but with a kind of notation that moderate use which is much more transparent. i suspect given that the data, added to suggest this is probably not the best way to teach writing, i suspect that grammatical analysis is probably best reserved for later stages in education, in high school and college. i think it is a subject worth teaching simply because it allows you to absorb advice on writing. it's very hard, and i found it impossible, to diagnose and repair can boom diluted -- convoluted sentences without being able to say, subordinate clause, a relative clause, or use terms like adjective and modifier. as with any technical subject you need to learn a little bit of vocabulary. cooking and photography and bicycling, and if someone doesn't know what an agenda is, it could be hard to give them explicit vice on writing. also i think that it's a fascinating subject in its own right. rather than just being a bunch of rules that you have to obey because the teacher said so, i think it to be taught at a branch of science. name of them was a system by which human beings share the thoughts, by use of words. if you think of it as in a pickle subject, like what are the ways of, if you don't know, of distinguishing an adjective rum a preposition, or a modifier from an adjective -- adjunct. you do experiments. i think it'd deeper inside as to have analyze it grammatically. but it probably isn't what you should do at the start, especially with an elementary school, where he indeed practice and writing we do more than kind of tap acknowledge that writers have to develop, and just as important, in reading, you can write a lacey jones -- endless you done a lot of reading. there are so many atms, some you will gather items, so many arbitrary quirks like punctuation that can be absorbed only by the immersion of world of text, that should be primary with lessons of grammar coming later. all most like a branch of science. >> over there in the back. >> i was curious, do you have for yourself sort of a either personally or professionally kind of the tipping point with regard to usage as to when you feel it's okay to use like the default meaning of the word, i'm thinking of words like hopefully or noxious, or literally sort of seems to be the perfect one to use right now. >> yes. the question is, is there some dividing line or tipping point as to when a construction that starts out as frowned upon by the purists but just becomes entrenched by use, and starts becoming unexceptional. at what point do you throw in the doubt and say, everyone uses it that way, i'm is what is use it that way, too. that's largely what the modern dictionaries are for, and why they are updated every decade or so. and why in many dictionaries such as the american heritage dictionary, cases that are either in transition or have always the vote controversy have usage notes attached to them. so instead of, and as a chair of the panel i'm partly responsible for gathering the data among a sample of writers, journalists, essayists, poets, novelists, scientists, linguists where we pulled them once a year with problematic usages or disputed uses his, and we report in usage notes what the consensus, if there is one, is. in cases where the votes are divided down the middle we tell leaders that, so that they can use their best judgment, being able to anticipate the reaction that they're likely to get. in some cases it's just purely generational. it's been said of science that science advances funeral by funeral. and the same is true of the english language. people grow up -- i don't know if there's anyone in this room who proceeds to contact as a newfangled slang term. and so as the generation that finds a term, to be objectionable dies, then it could be perfectly acceptable. in other cases you've got to consider who you're writing for. if you're writing for any more formal contexts there are certain conventions that you would be wise to follow. in a more casual setting you can get away with looser usage. but the overall framework is to be mindful of the expectations of your readers. because that's really the only authority. so the case of the correct meaning of nauseous, now, i don't know, how many of you realize that there's a controversy over the meaning of nauseous? so according, less than a quarter. according to a stickler's rule, notches may only be used to mean to be now seated. and may not be used to mean now seated. we