Athens

Steven Pinker's Advice on Writing: The Curse of Knowledge, Concrete Language, and Why AI Prose Is Banal

- Moritz Wallawitsch

Steven Pinker has written nine books about language, mind, and human nature. He is a professor of psychology at Harvard. He wrote The Sense of Style, which is the thinking person's guide to writing well. He has devoted his career to understanding why some sentences work and others fail.

His advice comes from David Perell's "How I Write" podcast, The Sense of Style, and his 13 writing tips.

The Curse of Knowledge

"The difficulty that we all have in knowing what it's like not to know something that we know."

This is Pinker's central insight. The curse of knowledge is the biggest threat to clear writing. It explains why experts write badly. They forget what it is like to not understand their subject. So they use jargon without defining it. They skip steps in their reasoning. They assume context the reader does not have.

He illustrates it with a story from a TED conference. A "brilliant molecular biologist" launched into a talk as if addressing peers. Within four seconds he lost the entire room. "It was obvious to everyone that no one was understanding a word. Obvious to everyone except the distinguished biologist." Not a stupid man. Just clueless about communication.

The fix: "Show it to people outside your field." Not people in your department. Not your spouse who has heard you talk about this for years. People who are genuinely unfamiliar with the topic. When Pinker's mother was alive, he showed her every book draft. Not because she was unsophisticated. She was "extremely intelligent, extremely well read." But she was not a cognitive psychologist. Her confusion showed where the curse struck.

This is harder than it sounds. Writing feels clear to the writer because the writer already knows what they mean. The curse is invisible from the inside. You need external eyes.

Classic Style

Pinker advocates what he calls "classic style." The writer has noticed something in the world. The reader, who is the writer's equal, happens not to have noticed it yet. The writer's job is to point it out, providing an unobstructed view.

This framework solves a common problem. Many writers unconsciously adopt an adversarial stance: I am the expert, you are the student. Classic style treats writing as a conversation between equals, where one person happens to know something the other does not. The result feels inviting rather than condescending.

Write with Confidence

Eliminate hedging words. "Somewhat," "fairly," "sort of," "arguably." These words signal uncertainty and undermine your authority. If you are not sure of your claim, investigate further before writing it. If you are sure, state it plainly.

Similarly, avoid intensifiers like "very," "extremely," and "highly." They paradoxically weaken arguments. "Very important" sounds less confident than "important." The qualifier introduces a scale where an absolute statement would be stronger.

Remove Needless Words

Pinker invokes Strunk and White: "Omit needless words." Then repeats it: "Omit needless words. Omit needless words."

Every word increases cognitive load for the reader. Fewer words means less effort to understand. Space constraints paradoxically improve prose quality because they force you to choose your words with precision. Pinker says compressing an article to fit a word limit "just improves the prose as if by magic."

This is Klinkenborg distilled to its essence. And Orwell's Rule 3: if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Use Verbs, Not Zombie Nouns

Avoid nominalizations: turning verbs into nouns with suffixes like "-ation," "-ment," "-ance." "We made a decision" should be "we decided." "The establishment of a program for the facilitation of" should be "we started a program to help."

Pinker calls these zombie nouns. They drain the life from sentences by burying the action inside abstract noun forms. Keep the action in verbs where readers can see it.

Concrete Language Over Abstraction

Readers form mental images from vivid language. The brain processes sensory, visual, and emotional content, not just words.

Instead of "stimulus proportional to intensity," write "kids look longer at a bunny than a truck." Instead of frameworks, paradigms, and concepts, write what you can see, touch, hear. "No one can form an image of a paradigm in their mind's eye."

18th and 19th century prose was more vivid because writers had to appeal to visual metaphors before academic abstractions existed. They wrote "the spirit of the hawk kneaded into our flesh" instead of "aggression." Fresh metaphors come from writing about what you can see. Stale abstractions come from writing about what you have read.

Balance Examples and Generalizations

"Generalizations without examples. I just don't know what they're talking about."

Neither works alone. Examples without interpretation are anecdotes. Generalizations without examples are abstractions. The best writing alternates: state the principle, show the example, let the example prove the principle.

Pinker demonstrates this live. He states the rule: "Familiar words don't have to refer to the literal meaning of their parts." Clear enough. Then the examples: "A bathroom isn't necessarily a room with a bath. Breakfast isn't necessarily breaking a fast. Christmas doesn't necessarily refer to Christ's mass." Now the rule makes sense. "Without the examples, you could nod and say, 'Oh, that sounds plausible.' But you really wouldn't have understood it."

Why Writing Is Harder Than Speaking

Speaking comes naturally. Writing does not. Pinker explains why.

In conversation, you share common ground with your listener. You know why you are there. You can use words like "this" and "that" and "the thing." You get real-time feedback: furrowed brows, quizzical expressions, requests for clarification. None of that exists in writing.

"Someone's picking a book up off the shelf. They've never met you. They may be living in a different country. You might be dead." Everything they need must be on the page.

This is why the curse of knowledge hits harder in writing than speech. In conversation, your listener can interrupt when confused. A reader just stops reading.

Why Children Write Better Than Professors

Children avoid cliches because "they haven't accumulated this mass of abstractions." Their explanations work like poetry: "Clouds are water vapor. Smoke is fire vapor." Unexpected juxtapositions without learned frameworks.

Adults bury their observations under layers of jargon, qualification, and hedging. The child says what they see. The professor explains why what they see fits into a theoretical framework nobody asked about.

There is a quote Pinker loves: "Listen to children. They haven't forgotten how to see."

The Aesthetics of Prose

Good writing has a sound. Pinker reads his drafts aloud, or at least mumbles them. "If you can't articulate it smoothly, your reader won't be mentally sounding it out smoothly either."

He pays attention to specific qualities:

  • Metrical structure. Language has a natural rhythm. Disrupting it too much interferes with reading, even silently.
  • Sibilant sounds. Too many "s" and "sh" sounds in a row make prose unpleasant. He picks synonyms to avoid sibilance.
  • Alliteration. A subtle bit of alliteration makes a sentence roll past more easily. Too much feels forced. The key: "You don't want to make it too conspicuous."

Reading aloud is Pinker's editing method. It is also Susan Orlean's. And Dean Koontz's. Every serious writer agrees on this point.

Why AI Prose Is Banal

"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."

AI produces recognizably robotic prose. Clear but uninspired. Pinker hypothesizes that like composite faces being more attractive than individual faces, LLMs average away awful constructions but also average away everything distinctive. Take a high school yearbook, morph all the faces together, and the result is attractive but bland. LLM prose works the same way.

This is the strongest scientific articulation of why AI writing feels wrong. It lacks what Pinker calls freshness. Every cliche was once a fresh metaphor. AI generates text from billions of examples of language, including billions of dead metaphors. The output inherits the staleness.

Key Takeaways

  • The curse of knowledge is the biggest threat. Show drafts to outsiders.
  • Adopt classic style. Write as an equal pointing something out, not an expert lecturing.
  • Write with confidence. Cut hedging words and intensifiers.
  • Omit needless words. Every word adds cognitive load.
  • Use verbs, not zombie nouns. Keep action visible.
  • Write concretely. "Kids look longer at a bunny" beats "stimulus proportional to intensity."
  • Alternate examples and generalizations. Neither works alone.
  • Read aloud. Attend to rhythm, sibilance, and alliteration.
  • AI prose is banal because it averages away everything distinctive.
  • Children write better than professors because they lack cliches.

Pinker's curse-of-knowledge principle is exactly what external editing helps with. You cannot see your own blind spots. AI editing with diffs provides a second pair of eyes that catches jargon, abstraction, and unnecessary complexity. Not a replacement for showing your draft to a real person. But a useful first pass before you do.

This post draws from Pinker's How I Write episode, The Sense of Style, and his 13 writing tips. Athens is an AI writing editor that helps you fight the curse of knowledge one sentence at a time.