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Some lessons I picked up from the interview:

1. The curse of knowledge is the biggest threat to clear writing.

2. It can be harder to write about a topic you’re an expert in because it’s so easy to forget what it's like to not know something, which makes you overestimate what the reader knows.

3. The easiest way to fight this curse of knowledge is to show drafts of your writing to people outside your field.

4. Shakespeare said: "Brevity is the soul of wit." The point is that saying something in fewer words will almost always make it better because it requires less cognitive load for the reader to understand.

5. Ok, let's try again: Saying something in fewer words will almost always make it better.

6. Ok, one more time: Remove needless words.

7. One reason why writing is harder than speaking is there's no real-time feedback. You have to imagine the audience's reaction.

8. The best thing you can say about how LLMs write is that the sentence structure is sound. But the downside is how generic and banal the outputs are.

9. 18th and 19th century writing is more vivid because the abstractions that modern writers use hadn't been invented yet. Calling somebody "pathologically aggressive" isn’t nearly as vivid as saying: "They grabbed me by the throat."

10. Generalizations without examples are useless, and examples without generalizations are pointless. You need to marry them both. Generalizations show the big picture. Examples make them concrete.

11. The more vivid a piece of writing, the more people can form a mental image of what you’re saying. Avoid abstractions: frameworks, paradigms, concepts. All those things. Get concrete, so people can see what you’re actually talking about. For example, don’t talk about a “stimulus that awakened your senses” when you can say: “I got excited because I saw a cute bunny rabbit.”

12. Academic writing should be clear. I mean… if the taxpayers are funding most of the research, shouldn’t they be able to understand it?

"I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one."

'Don't be prosaic. Even when life gets hard, don't go flat. Stay vibrant. Speak with wonder. Dress your words in colour. Brighten the narrative...whether you're writing, preaching, designing, dining, presenting or just describing the weather. Make every moment shine' I am inspired by Steven Pinker so I made my own quote soon after I heard this video

I love this : “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” Heraclitus

Writing from Iran; still feeling dizzy, feeling broken and beaten, but the hope is alive, the hope for a better situation. There is no internet yest after about 2 months and half, I needed to pay a lot for a vpn to just be able to comment here.. but there is something rooted in us in the name of Hope🌱.

When Jefferson urged Congress to write for the people, not the pedants, he taught us to empathize with readers and resist the jargon of bureaucrats; when Lincoln lifted the Gettysburg soil into speech, he showed that vivid imagery, not abstract frameworks, binds a nation’s memory; when Roosevelt balanced generalizations with examples, trusts broken, jobs created, he proved that compression and concreteness can carry legislative thunder; and when Churchill kept prose rhythmic and concise, mocking tyranny yet meditating on freedom, he revealed that the cadence of clarity conquers the fog of pompous words.

What I learned from this video about writing in the era of AI is that you have to tell people your piece is about AI to catch their attention when it really isn't.

Reminds me of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language “

English isn't even my second language. However, I've progressed a lot especially in writing. All thank to the book The Sense of Style of Steven Pinker. I read the book more the 4 times. It's fantastic and full of wisdom. I really recommend it for everyone out there who wants to get better at English.

“Our language contains a fossil record of rules we no longer use”

Holy crap, he’s good!

I loved this interview! I wrote a 4k word essay and was both shocked and thrilled after taking a week to knock it down 2K. I didn't think it could be done, and then afterword I couldn't believe I'd been so bloated.

24:18 “If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.”

It's definitely worth it just because it's Steven Pinker, but the channel totally clickbaited the thumbnail and section titles. The conversation has nothing to do with LLMs.

I moved out of science partially because of writing frustration. There is the misconception that clarity comes from being extremely precise. I literally handed in a draft paper with 5000 words to my PhD supervisor, only for him to come back to me and say: the next hours we should first discuss these 3 words you use. Otherwise the whole field will be confused.
Good writing should be robust, easy to read and form a clear image. If one word changes the meaning of your whole paper, it's exhausting to read and you've just written a bad paper. I always assumed that I was just a bad writer.

For those interested in the AI issue, AI isn’t discussed until about 38:00.

This deserves a standing ovation.

Everything works beautifully when you speak from your heart

Steven Pinker explains that the primary cause of bad writing is the "curse of knowledge," a cognitive bias where writers assume readers possess their same level of background understanding. To overcome this barrier, communicators must practice audience empathy, seek external feedback, and replace dense abstractions with concrete, visual language.

So much of journal writing is so poorly written I had always assumed I was just not smart enough to understand it.

On bad writing in academia. I discovered that one of my graduate professors had won a writing award. I was perplexed; I always thought this person was a BAD writer. I hunted down the winning article, and the first sentence had an eight-word parenthetical expression in it. It was an insult to good writing. I joined with other grad students in history to form a writing group, and the faculty acted as if we were a subversive group. One of the chief idiocies of academic history departments is that they won't admit that it is the well-written history books that survive and have influence. They act as if it is all about "truth."