Click on the link below to watch Stephen Pinker, one of social science’s greats, give a one-hour talk on how to write good scientific papers:

Communicating Science and Technology in the 21st Century: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker: “The Sense of Style: Scientific Communication for the 21st Century”
Harvard College Professor, and Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

Let’s face it: most scientists are terrible communicators. Why do the world’s most cerebral people find it so hard to convey their ideas? And how can we learn to do better? I suggest that answers can be found in a number of ideas from the modern sciences of mind and language. Among them are: The Tree and the Chain (how multidimensional ideas are mapped onto one-dimensional strings); The Curse of Knowledge (why it’s so hard to imagine what it’s like not to know something you do know); and Long Shadow of Mrs. Grundy (how to distinguish rules of proper usage that are worth keeping from those that are bogus)

The first annual Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering lecture about communicating complex scientific and technological subjects clearly and engagingly in the series: “Communicating Science and Technology in the 21st Century.”

Recorded on 9/12/12