Journal of a Sabbatical

May 8, 2001

how bad writing protects against alzheimer's disease and what this has to do with sunflowers and the cold war

Today's Reading: Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux

Today's Starting Pitcher: Hideo Nomo

I was listening to Fresh Air this afternoon after I'd already been thinking about writing and what makes it good or bad or effective. The guest had just come out with a book about the famous U of Kentucky nun study. That's the study that analyzed some autobiographies the nuns wrote in their early twenties. Basically they graded the language of the autobiographies in grammatical complexity and "idea density." The nuns whose youthful writing showed low idea density had a dramatically higher incidence of Alzheimer's in old age. That suggests that people who, in their youth, produce sentences that are grammatically simple and low in idea content have a higher risk of developing cognitive impairments in old age, compared with those who use more grammatically complex and idea-dense sentences. I call this the bad-writing nuns study (see example).

Does the production of complex and idea-dense sentences in early life somehow strengthen the brain against later deterioration? Is the ability to form such sentences evidence of some kind of inherent protection that exists before such language use begins? Is the inability to produce such complex sentences evidence that the brain deterioration starts early in life? These are all questions that leap to mind.

More questions arise that don't seem to be coming up in discussion of the study, though. Is writing style at age 20 related to early education? If the nuns who wrote simple declarative sentences in the active voice in their autobiographies did so because they were taught that passive voice and dependent clauses constituted bad writing can we conclude that their early education affected not only their writing style but their brain function?

OK, I feel a little like the guy in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance who went insane trying to define quality, but that's not a bad analogy because Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the best book ever written about technical writing. When the nun study first came out I immediately picked up on the link between simple declarative sentences and Alzheimer's disease. Does this mean that good technical writers are doomed to develop Alzheimer's? As a former documentation manager, am I responsible for increasing my subordinates' risk of Alzheimer's by insisting on second person, active voice, simple declarative sentences?

Is the DEM employee who replaced the "Danger Keep Off Jetty" signs with "Jetty Not Designed for Public Access" at less risk of Alzheimer's while the fishing public is at more risk of falling off the jetty?

Looks like we've got chicken and egg questions all over the place and no answers.

Most technical writers at one time or another have heard the anecdote about the plumber who started using hydrochloric acid on clogged pipes. He was pleased with the results but he wondered if he might be doing something wrong so he wrote to some experts in Washington for advice. He received the following reply:

"The efficacy of hydrochloric acid in the subject situation is incontrovertible, but its corrosiveness is incompatible with the integrity of metallic substances."

He took that as approval and sent the experts a thank you letter telling them he would spread the word to other plumbers about his discovery to which they replied:

"In no case can we be presumed responsible for the generation of pernicious residues from hydrochloric acid, and we strongly recommend, therefore, that an alternative method be utilized."

The plumber was pleased and wrote back that 15 plumbers in his city were now using hydrochloric acid for pipes. The experts wrote back quickly:

"Stop using hydrochloric acid. And tell your friends to stop too. It eats the hell out of pipes."

You get the idea. The third response has the desired effect, to get the plumber to stop using hydrochloric acid. Admittedly the impenetrable obfuscation of the experts is not especially grammatically complex or idea-dense, so maybe it's not the best example to support my point, but it does illustrate the general idea that more complex writing is not necessarily better writing.

So why have the psycholinguists fastened on complex writing as an indicator of cognitive functioning? Presumably a person with good cognitive functioning and some education in how to write would express herself clearly. How many ideas is a sentence supposed to have anyway? I was taught in grade school to start a new sentence for a new idea. Is there something innate in an Alzheimer's resistant brain that overrides early training?

And what about writing in languages other than English? If a person learns a language with a simpler grammar as her first language, does this sort of test have any meaning? Do certain languages predispose people to Alzheimer's? So let's add nature vs. nurture to chicken and egg and get a whole 'nother can of worms.

And if this writing thing is so predictive of Alzheimer's, can we predict it on the basis of someone's verbal SAT scores? Or is it just the writing, not the verbal abilities?

And what if the nuns had been given cameras or violins at age 20 and scientists had studied their ability to take pictures or play Mozart? Would that tell us anything about their future cognitive deterioration? Why writing? Why bad writing? Inquiring minds want to know.

I mentioned in the first paragraph that I was already thinking about writing quality when I tuned in the Fresh Air show about the bad-writing nuns study. What was on my mind concerned my disappointment with my own writing in my entry about visiting Kaposvar. I had just read an essay by Paul Theroux in Fresh Air Fiend that touched on some of the same themes I was trying to explore in that entry. Theroux's essay succeeded where mine didn't in evoking the internal experience of travel and memory.

Comparing the Theroux essay to my hastily written journal entry is perhaps silly. A published essay is meant to be polished. He probably revised and rewrote multiple times. My journal entry is raw and written in the moment, with only as much reflection as the end of the day provides. However, it brought up for me something that has nagged at me about my writing for a very long time. I can see themes and connections and resonance in my experiences but the words fall flat on the page.

The brain that can commit to paper the UNIX device driver interface so clearly that the book is still in print nearly 13 years later (I just got my semiannual minuscule royalty check so this is on my mind) may actually function differently from the brain that can put words to the profound feelings of hope and joy evoked by fields of sunflowers on the road to the Vladivostok airport early on an August morning in 1996 and how that resonated with and was amplified by BiB's photos of Bosnian sunflower fields, which I saw at a family gathering the following day, and how those sunflower fields echoed in the Hungarian hills in another August and then somehow connect with the yellow carpet of rape seed blossoms seen from the windows of the train to Kaposvar.

I have tried for years now to write a poem, working title "Post Cold War Sunflowers", that captures what sunflowers have to do with the end of the Cold War for me, but all that comes out is simple declarative sentences of subject verb object. Transforming powerful feelings and visual images into articulate and verbal sentences is hard for me. My photograph of a bullet hole in brick on the side of the Botanical Department building immediately says more about memory than a whole dictionary full of words. Even my written imagery is very visual. One poetry instructor described my poems as painterly. Yet I have this idea that I have to become a writer, oops, I already am a writer, and produce some prose work out of all this time away from the corporate world. Somewhere I absorbed the notion that words count more.

Here comes the chicken and egg again. And nature and nurture too. If the seeds of inadequate verbal ability are present and visible early in life, as in the nun study, was I born to be a photographer instead of a writer? Have I been fighting against my innate nature all my life? Am I doomed to Alzheimer's? Probably not as I managed to deliberately squeeze lots of run-on sentences and dependent clauses into this entry. But that feeling of not being able to penetrate through the thicket of my own brain to communicate what sunflowers have to do with the Cold War persists, whether it's predictive of anything or not.

And stay off the damn jetty, OK?

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