While visiting my daughter in Bozeman a couple of weeks ago, I stopped in at Vargo’s and picked up a copy of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (Viking, 2014). Here he is in Chapter 2:
“Writing is an unnatural act. As Charles Darwin observed, ‘Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.’ The spoken word is older than our species, and the instinct for language allows children to engage in articulate conversation years before they enter a schoolhouse. But the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond.”
Pinker is a psycholinguist and cognitive scientist. He’s the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He’s the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. And he’s a legit public intellectual in an era when that term is carelessly applied to all manner of charlatans. But I’m going to edit him anyway. Ready? Here goes: Writing is hard.
There. That about sums it up.
The thing is, I’ve been at it professionally for more than 15 years now, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. Was it supposed to? I dunno. I guess I thought that, at some point, it might come a little more readily. It hasn’t. Pinker explains:
“Writing is above all an act of pretense. We have to visualize ourselves in some kind of conversation, or correspondence, or oration, or soliloquy, and put words into the mouth of the little avatar who represents us in this simulated world.”
That’s the problem. It isn’t that I lack the ability to string words into a coherent sentence. It’s that what I produce—whether it’s a script for a television commercial or a billboard headline or a rambling blog post—is only one side of a conversation. And I’ll likely never get an opportunity to hear the other side.
Still beats working for a living, though.
by Linda