Writing, Clear and Simple

If you forget everything else you ever knew about writing, remember this:

By taking up the study of writing now, you are assuming consciously, probably for the first time in your lives, a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. […]

The first obligation of a writer is to tell the truth—or to come as near to telling it as is humanly possible.

—Wendell Berry 

(With thanks to Alice Linsley.)

As much as I love writing, and as much as I think it’s one of the most important tools that the human race has invented, still I am sometimes surprised by what it can do.

A “writing clinician,” Nancy Morgan, asked cancer patients in a Washington, DC, cancer center to write about how cancer had changed them, and how they felt about those changes. It was a simple exercise on the surface, but for many patients, expressing their thoughts and feelings helped improve their thoughts and feelings, in turn leading to a better quality of life.

In other words: Writing is good for you. 

This study was printed in the journal The Oncologist. You can download a PDF copy here.

As I mentioned, I’m in Portland, Oregon, for the WritersUA conference. The keynote speaker was Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language.

Figuring out how language originated is complicated by the fact that speech leaves no fossils. Because solving the question then necessarily involves so much speculation, the French Linguistics Society went so far as to ban discussing the question at all, and for many years, there wasn’t any scholarly work done to even consider some possibilities. That has finally begun to change.

One of the interesting things about language is that it’s not a single ability, but rather a suite of abilities. We’re all born with this innate suite, but the ability to speak seems to develop only if we are spoken to; it does not arise spontaneously on its own. Thus, if we learn to speak only because we are spoken to, how did language arise?

Among the abilities that allow us to use the amazingly powerful tool we call language are the following:

• Words (Kenneally pointed out that a word is not a discrete thing, but rather a “nexus of information;” for example, the word rose conjures up many meanings, images, and associations, such as the definition of the word, its scent and color, the texture of the petals, the prick of thorns in your fingertips, and any emotions surrounding your experiences giving or receiving roses.)
• Syntax: the rules about how we arrange words
• Cognition: the kinds of thinking that support language use
• Gesture and body language
• Cooperation

Regarding cognition, Kenneally told us about Rico, a Border Collie who has learned to recognize hundreds of words. Given a command to fetch one of the words he recognizes, he will be able to select it out of an assortment of objects. In one experiment, the researchers prepared a selection of objects, and one of them was a thing that Rico didn’t know the word for; the rest were things that he learned the word for. He was told to fetch the unknown thing, and he selected the correct object. It appears that Rico was in some way reasoning like this: “I don’t know that word, but I understand that I’m supposed to fetch something. Here are some things, and I know what most of these things are called. I don’t know what this one thing is called, so this unknown thing must be the something that I’m supposed to fetch.”

Two of the major components supporting our linguistic abilities are self-awareness and cooperation. Some animals have both of these abilities; for example, dolphins, chimpanzees, and elephants all exhibit some degree of self-awareness and cooperative behavior. But it appears that humans are highly skilled at social reasoning (a key part of cooperation): We are very good at inferring what’s going on in someone else’s head based on how they react to our actions, and then adjusting our actions based on that inference.

Kenneally said that language is the foundation for so many things:

• Numbers and mathematics: Many animals appear to understand numbers less than three, but aren’t able to go beyond that.
  
• Complex tools: Again, many animals use tools of one or two components, but humans create and use extremely complex tools.
• Science
• Folklore

Using numbers to express dates is a common practice, so you don’t have to worry about people being confused when you write something like “Our annual meeting will be held on 5/6/2008.” Right? Everyone knows that bit of shorthand translates to May 6th, right?

Not so fast. If you show that date—5/6/2008—to someone from Europe, and they might tell you that it means June 5th, not March 6th. Where the American convention is Month/Day/Year (MM/DD/YYYY), the European convention is that the day comes first, followed by the month, and then the year. (They frequently do the same even when spelling out the months; today’s date would be expressed as 6 March, 2008.)

So if you can, write dates using the names of the months. If you use a numeric format, explain which one you’re using, MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY.