Steven Pinker is Harvard's most famous psychology professor, the author of nine books, and one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people.

Some highlights from our interview:

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

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

3. 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.

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.

7. 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.

8. 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."

9. 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.

10. 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.”

11. 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've shared the full conversation with @sapinker below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube or listen on Apple or Spotify, check out the reply tweets.