Here are the 13 tips of the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker for a better writing / Boing Boing

In January Twitter, Steven Pinker, Scientist in Cognitive Science, author of Enlightenment Now, shared 13 tips for writing:

1. Reverse engineering of what you read. If it sounds good to you to write, what makes it good? If it's awful, why?
2. Prose is a window to the world. Let your readers see what you see using a visual and concrete language.
3. Do not go meta. Minimize concept concepts such as "approach, hypothesis, concept, condition, context, context, problem, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, trend" and "variable".
4. That verbs are verbs. "Appear", not "make an appearance."
5. Be wary of the curse of knowledge: when you know something, it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know. Minimize acronyms and technical terms. Use "for example" generously. Present a rough draft and get ready to learn that what is obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone.
6. Omit useless words (Will Strunk was right about this).
7. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).
8. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.
9. Save the heaviest for the last: a complex sentence should go to the end of the sentence.
10. The prose must be consistent: the reader must know how each sentence is related to the previous one. If it is not obvious, use "that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, accordingly, because, nevertheless" or "in spite of".
11. Review several times for the sole purpose of improving the prose.
12. Read loudly.
13. Find the best word, which is not always the most whimsical word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes and a thesaurus.

[via Open Culture]

Image from Rose Lincoln / Harvard University – https://stevenpinker.com/content/photographs-steven-pinker, CC BY 3.0, Link

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