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High Culture

Steven Pinker’s 13 rules for writing better

The Harvard psychologist loves reading authors’ rules for writing. Here are his own.
NEW YORK, NY - JULY 21: Steven Pinker speaks onstage during OZY Fest 2018 at Rumsey Playfield, Central Park on July 21, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for Ozy Media)
Key Takeaways
  • Steven Pinker is many things: linguist, psychologist, optimist, Harvard professor, and author.
  • When it comes to writing, he’s a student and a teacher.
  • Here’s are his 13 rules for writing better, more simply, and more clearly.
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1. Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why?

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1. Reverse-engineer what you read.
2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.

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2. Prose is a window onto the world. 
3. Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like “approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency,” and “variable.”

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3. Don’t go meta. 
4. Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appearance.”

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4. Let verbs be verbs.
5. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else

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5. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge.
Steven Pinker: Is human nature evil?

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Interlude: Steven Pinker’s take on human nature. Is it evil?

Against chaos: The world is a hard place, but maybe humans aren’t …

6. Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).

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6. Omit needless words.
7. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).

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7. Avoid clichés like the plague.
8. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.

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8. Old information at the beginning, new information at the end.
9. Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.

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9. Save the heaviest for last.
Why libertarianism will never be a universal value

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Interlude: Steven Pinker’s take on libertarianism (at any age, it’s marginal).
10. Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use “that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless,” or “despite.”

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10. Prose must cohere.
11. Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.

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11. Revise several times.
12. Read it aloud.

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12. Read it aloud.
13. Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus.

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13. Find the best word.

Want to dig further into Pinker’s writing style? Here’s the book he wrote on the subject. Enjoy!

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