Yellowlees Douglas - The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer

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Yellowlees Douglas 2015

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For my tireless, endlessly proactive, and visionary acquisitions editor Rebecca Taylor at Cambridge University Press. Without her interventions, this book would have been consigned to oblivion or Amazon's Create Space.

From the outset, Ive silently thanked my initial round of anonymous psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists, who provided spot-on advice on shifting the focus of The Reader's Brain without a smidgen of the usual squeamishness academics exhibit at a reader-friendly approach in academic writing. Dr. Kenneth Heilman graciously provided me with a compelling narrative about a stroke patient, as well as references to two cases that proved integral to my thinking about writing, cadence, and the brain. And my credibility here wouldve been shot without the eagle eyes and superb suggestions for revision I received from Professors Gordon Pradl and Norman Holland. Both dramatically influenced the sensible side of my career and saved my bacon here. Finally, I owe an incalculable debt to Professor Sherrilene Classen, whose timely email enquiring after the availability of this book prompted me to submit the proposal one last time, after a decade of rejections. Without the enthusiasm both she and Rebecca Taylor displayed for the manuscript, this book would never have ended up in your hands.

Most people shun writing the way any chordate instinctively shuns pain. The task of writing is inescapably labor-intensive, no matter how facile a writer you are. Every blank page demands its lines of coherent sentences and cohesive paragraphs that ultimately amount to something like a rational, convincing argument. But our fear of writing reaches far beyond the hours we know well sweat over a keyboard, colonizing our blank screens with words. Instead, most of us are less afraid of the hard work than of grappling for hours with a complex system whose working parts we barely know. As a professor who has taught writing for more years than Id care to publicly admit, Ive heard thousands of confessions that gush out of students. Im a terrible writer , they confess. Or, Writings my major weakness . Strikingly, the majority of students who make these confessions are fairly strong writers just as the students who assure me that theyre good writers tend to create fresh paragraphs whenever they feel the reader needs to see a bit of white space, rather than from any sense of a paragraph as a coherent entity. Obviously, some sort of odd phenomenon must be at work here, when college students and even seasoned professionals have no idea whether their writing skills are adequate for a stringer position on the New York Times or barely pass muster as a child reporter writing for the East Palatka Elementary Gazette . Try making a similar analogy for reading or analytical skills, and youll discover most people have a sound grasp of their abilities in these areas. But when the discussion turns to writing, a disconcerting number of us find ourselves at sea.