Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, one of my favorite nonfiction authors, has previously written several books on language, notably THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, WORDS AND RULES, and THE STUFF OF THOUGHT. I particularly recommend THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, packed with fascinating information in Pinker's lucid, witty style. His newest work, THE SENSE OF STYLE, subtitled "The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century," speaks directly to writers as well as anyone interested in what makes for clear writing and distinguishes good prose from bad. Although he focuses on nonfiction (with many examples, analyzed to reveal their authors' strategies), his advice applies to fiction, too.
He discusses one problem especially relevant to nonfiction writers but a concern of anyone who wants to communicate clearly—the "curse of knowledge." In brief, we tend to assume our audience knows our subject as well, or almost as well, as we do. We may use specialized terms without defining them. We leap between connections plain to us but possibly opaque to many of our readers. "Like a drunk who is too impaired to realize that he is too impaired to drive, we do not notice the curse because the curse prevents us from noticing it." Another issue Pinker tackles at length is the lack of a gender-neutral animate pronoun in English. "It" certainly won't do as a substitute for "he or she," but (as Pinker clearly illustrates) the use of "he" to cover both genders has become obsolete and doesn't work very well anyway. He defends the much-maligned "they" for persons of unknown gender, whether singular or plural.
By analyzing our comprehension of written prose with reference to the way the human brain processes information, Pinker demonstrates exactly why a sentence or paragraph that seems incoherent has that effect on us. This neuroscience approach helps him to unfold the reasons why some of the revered "rules" of grammar and syntax make sense and others are merely fossilized superstitions. He distinguishes between the rules worth following for their own sake and those writers need to know mainly to appease picky editors. I found the final chapter, "Telling Right from Wrong," the most enjoyable and informative, where he runs down a long list of traditionally "wrong" usages and briefly notes why he considers these prohibitions obsolete. He follows up with a shorter list of distinctions in word usages that he thinks ARE worth keeping. I don't agree with all his recommendations (I'll never accept the phrase "between you and I" or the verb "lay" as synonymous with "lie," except in dialogue), but he always makes his points in persuasive and entertaining ways.
He also illustrates the text with cartoons from a variety of sources, from "Doonesbury" and "Shoe" to the WASHINGTON POST. Recommended for all writers and grammar geeks!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's CryptI just wanted to note this while it's fresh. A lawyer for the Nonhuman Rights Project is suing on behalf of a chimpanzee named Tommy, claiming Tommy is "unlawfully imprisoned" and deserves "legal personhood." A decision in favor would have profound implications for the legal status of other higher nonhuman animals:
Chimpanzee RightsRise of the Planet of the Apes? Even more, this case brings to mind Heinlein's classic story "Jerry Was a Man," which centers on a lawsuit to grant an enhanced chimp legal personhood.
Margaret L. Carter
"The Hole in Reality" is the title of the science column by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty in the current issue of FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (September-October 2014). It's about some of the myriad ways "your brain makes up the world." As many philosophers have taught and neuroscience now confirms, we don't perceive the outside world "as it is." Information gathered by our senses gets filtered by the brain in often surprising ways. To make sense of our environment, our minds rely on "short cuts" and "predetermined expectations" without which the volume of sensory input would overwhelm us. In short, "You don't see the world at all. You see a picture of the world that your brain constructs." As a result, we usually see what we expect to see.
Murphy and Doherty begin by illustrating this principle with examples of optical illusions. You can check out one of them here:
Dragon IllusionThe paper dragon appears solid and seems to turn its head to follow the viewer, even though in fact it's not moving (the observer is). The illusion of solidity gives the false impression of motion. The F&SF article also gives examples of how the mind plays tricks with distance and size, as in distorted rooms where people walking around appear to enlarge and shrink as they change position relative to the observer.
The article then goes on to discuss how the brain's ingrained expectations form our attitudes and reactions below the conscious level. Here's a page with some tests you can take to evaluate your own unconscious biases. They cover numerous different areas, such as race, gender, religion, etc.:
Implicit AssociationsI took the "religion" test, just to find out how the page functions. Since it asks the subject to work as fast as possible, I'm not convinced it measures much more than one's hand-eye-keyboard coordination, but it's an interesting experience anyway.
The F&SF article talks briefly about confirmation bias—our tendency to seek information that supports our existing beliefs and neglect or filter out disproving data—and the "relevance paradox"—overlooking information we consider "distracting or unnecessary" because it doesn't fit into our preconceived pattern. Murphy and Doherty discuss how science fiction can, little by little, change what we perceive through that "hole in reality."
Historical fiction can sometimes have a similar effect, as occurred to me this week while rereading (yet again, but for the first time in a while) Diana Gabaldon's OUTLANDER. The heroine, Claire, a World War II nurse, has accidentally traveled through time from 1945 to 1743, where circumstances force her to marry Scottish Highland clansman Jamie Fraser. I can hardly wait until April to find out how the STARZ network series will handle the scene where Jamie punishes Claire with a beating for disobeying his order to stay where he left her. Because of her disobedience, she gets captured by the villain, British officer Black Jack Randall, thus putting not only Claire and Jamie but their entire group in danger. This section of the novel illustrates with stunning force that "the past is a different country" (to repeat one of my favorite quotations). Twentieth-century career woman Claire finds the custom of a man's administering corporal punishment to his wife appalling, and she doesn't think much more highly of the practice of thrashing children for misbehavior. Jamie—whom we know by this point to be a kind, honorable man who passionately cares for her—finds her attitude baffling. He recalls many instances of beatings from his own father, whom he respected and loved. Later in the book, we see a graphic illustration of the difference between that kind of parental discipline and brutal child abuse, which Jamie abhors. But will the TV series have the time and space to show all this context in a way that will prevent losing the audience's sympathy? After the beating, Claire reflects that up to then her eighteenth-century surroundings haven't seemed quite real to her. Compared to the horrors of World War II, skirmishes between small bands of musket- and claymore-wielding fighters feel almost quaint. King George and Bonnie Prince Charlie are names from classroom history lessons to her. Yet a sword can kill a man just as dead as a bomb.
C. S. Lewis remarks somewhere that the books of the past—and the books of the future, if we had access to them—by highlighting the unquestioned beliefs of other times and places, illuminate our own implicit beliefs. From the perspective of a time traveler from the past or future, or an alien visitor, doubtless people in our era hold world-view assumptions, shared by all political, ethnic, and religious sectors, that remain invisible to us because we see them as simply "the way things are." They represent the our brains' construction of reality. As Murphy and Doherty point out, science fiction can break open those world-views and create "holes" through which to view reality in fresh ways.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's CryptThis article by Susan Reimer of the BALTIMORE SUN is headlined "The End of Marriage" on the website and the editorial page of the print issue for that day:
The End of MarriageHeadlines, of course, aren't written by the author of the article. I trust Reimer herself didn't intend to make such a sweeping pronouncement of doom on the grounds that, as she puts it, "The American household is nearly unrecognizable from our sitcom past." The nuclear family "made up of a breadwinning father, a homemaking mother, and a couple of kids" can hardly be considered synonymous with the whole institution of marriage, considering the concept was invented in the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution met middle-class Victorian values, and reached a brief peak in the 1950s. This model was, of course, far from universal even among the American middle class at the time (I myself grew up in a "blended" family; my father and stepmother were both previously married and divorced, with children, and Mamma worked full-time until the birth of our half-sister), and unattainable in any era for most working-class families. Moreover, Reimer notes that this period sometimes idealized as "the golden age of family life" was "also a repressive time for women."
Regardless of the headline, the bulk of her essay, in fact, isn't about the shift from the "Ozzie and Harriet" ideal to more varied types of marriage such as male-breadwinner and two-career households, not to mention same-sex unions. It's mainly about recent research on the links between out-of-wedlock childbirth and poverty. Few people would deny the importance of family stability and "a sense of certainty about the core issues of job security, wages, health care, child care and retirement" to lifting parents and children out of poverty. These issues, however, are separate from the observed trend that, as remarked by sociologist Philip Cohen of the University of Maryland, "there is no single family arrangement that encompasses a majority of children."
For a more nuanced analysis of American marriage trends as contrasted with what the popular imagination views as "traditional," I recommend sociologist Stephanie Coontz's THE WAY WE NEVER WERE. Interestingly, when Coontz asked her college students in the early 1990s to define the traditional marriage, they described a cross between OZZIE AND HARRIET and THE WALTONS, often citing those TV series by name. In fact, those programs portrayed two distinctly different models of marriage and the family, and the 1950s ideal was a conscious reaction against the Depression-era extended-family household.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
I have a new erotic paranormal romance published by Ellora's Cave in their "VaVa Boomers" theme month, featuring heroines over fifty. In my novelette "Romantic Retreat," a woman whose husband has just retired from the Navy disagrees with him about how to spend their "bonus years." But he brushes off her misgivings about his plan to uproot them from their current home and take a high-stress civilian job. Then a friend gives her an enchanted miniature model of a fairy-tale cottage. Its magic transports her and her husband into the cottage in a pocket dimension, where they have twenty-four uninterrupted hours to reconnect romantically and settle their differences:
Romantic RetreatOf all the fiction I've written, this story draws most extensively on my own background as a career Navy wife (with numerous changes in details, of course). We've all heard the precept "write what you know," as well as the reservations and counter-arguments. For example, it's obvious that if "what you know" means what you've personally lived through, nobody could create fantasy or science fiction. Henry James once said that an author doesn't necessarily need a broad variety of real-life experiences but, rather, should be a person "upon whom nothing is lost." In so far as "write what you know" is taken to mean using events from one's own life, however, I don't think it's the best advice for a beginning writer. The typical young aspiring author doesn't have a lot of life experience yet. More importantly, in my opinion writing about one's own experiences is the hardest thing to do well, not the easiest. It takes a long time to integrate memories through reflection before one can translate them into effective art.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
We all know many plants grow toward light or, in the case of those such as sunflowers, literally turn toward the sun. But researchers are discovering that plants have the ability to react to their environments in other ways:
Plant IntelligenceSome can "hear," sort of—they respond to threatening noises by secreting defensive chemicals. Roots have been found to sense the presence of obstacles and change their direction of growth in advance. Some anesthetics that work on human beings also affect plants. One experiment described in the article suggests that plants can "remember" and in a sense "learn." While they don't have brains, "They don't have nerve cells like humans, but they do have a system for sending electrical signals and even produce neurotransmitters, like dopamine, serotonin and other chemicals the human brain uses to send signals."
Do adaptations such as these qualify plants to be labeled "intelligent," even without brains and neurons? Depends on your definition of intelligence, of course. If intelligence simply means problem-solving or the ability to "process information" and act on it, maybe they meet the criteria.
So maybe people who talk to their plants have a point, even if the plants don't talk back. And this research may hint that we could eventually meet the sentient or even sapient vegetable aliens of science fiction. (Not like Triffids, I hope!) Their view of reality would doubtless be very different from ours, however. For one thing, they would probably live—and think—at a much slower pace.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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