Since We Can’t Read Each Other’s Minds (Yet), Let’s Not Suck at Writing
And “The Sense of Style” by Steven Pinker is a hell of a good start on how not to suck.
Humans have a powerhouse inside their skulls.
Yes, I refer to our brains. We produce more thoughts per minute than a toy factory in China cranking out Pokémons.
We think about politics then about what’s for lunch then about our hot neighbor — all that in a few seconds. Oh, you don’t think about your neighbor? Sorry.
Let’s stick with politics then. Say I have an opinion about Kamala Harris. Wouldn’t it be great if I could simply use telepathy to upload my thinking into your head? Of course, but I can’t, at least for now.
Or we could talk, sure. It just so happens I don’t have your phone number. LOL.
So, I write down my thoughts about Kamala hoping you’ll read and understand them. If I’m a competent writer, the thought transfer process will be successful. If not, you may end up thinking Kamala is my hot neighbor.
Truth is: used well, writing is still the one-to-be-beaten thought-sharing app.
An app called writing
It’s not only your beloved phone that has an app store. Thousands of years ago, humankind launched its own.
In this store, we have many apps available for download. Music and math are among the most popular, together with the best idea-sharing app ever: writing.
Writing is so powerful an app that it even allows us to recover a thought uploaded centuries ago by Descartes in his book “Discourse on the Method”. If that doesn’t sound amazing to you, go see a doctor.
And sorry, we don’t have a telepathy app yet. Hey Elon Musk, are you reading this? Elon? Are you there?
Anyway, since writing is still the most used thought-sharing app in the world, what about we master it?
How to use the writing app
“The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader” — Steven Pinker
This is as important as not forgetting the milk on your way home — married folks will understand.
This means we need to be careful when writing, otherwise readers will be lost, or worse still, understand the opposite of what we mean.
Say you write “I heard the shooting of the hunters.”
Did you hear the hunters shooting, or did you hear someone shooting the hunters?
See?
When you upload an idea to a book or blog post, you have to format it in a way that I can successfully process the information once I download it to my brain.
If you fail to insert a comma where there should be one, you can end up with a funny sentence like “Let’s eat grandma” or, God forbid, initiate a nuclear war when, after asking your commander “Do I launch the missile now, sir?”, he texts you back with “Don’t wait” instead of “Don’t, wait”.
And what about quotation marks? Can you imagine what your grandma (that you hopefully didn’t eat) would think if she saw this?
Finally, if I write something like “A decision was made by the committee regarding the implementation of the new policy, which will result in an increase in productivity. The adjustments will be monitored by the department to ensure that the effectiveness of the changes is evaluated on a regular basis.”, you’ll experience a stack overflow followed by a blue screen of death.
Instead, I should go with “The committee decided to put the new policy into action to boost productivity. The department will keep track of the changes to make sure they are working well.”
Much better, right?
Do we have a deal?
Let’s not be sloppy users of one of the best apps ever created.
Let’s make an effort to avoid processing errors when we download each other’s thoughts, so that we can continue to marvel at pearls like this one from Richard Dawkins:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly these unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
Are you in?
