Scholars Talk Writing: Steven Pinker

The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Steven Pinker is about as close as you can come to being an academic celebrity. The Harvard professor of psychology has written seven books for a general readership in addition to his scholarly work, which is wide-ranging. Pinker frequently writes about language for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, and The Atlantic, and also tackles subjects such as education, morality, politics, bioethics, and violence.

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Since many people are under the misconception that you have to write badly in academia to be taken seriously, I’ll just mention some renowned scholars in my own field whom I read as an undergraduate and who were sparkling prose stylists.

My adviser Roger Brown was a great social psychologist, the founder of the modern study of language acquisition in children, and the author of the delightful Words and Things: An Introduction to Language and Social Psychology.

Read the whole story: The Chronicle of Higher Education