If you read the wizard’s rant last week, you’ll remember his response to the guy who foolishly claimed, “It’s been proven that we remember more of what we see than what we hear.”

The wizard asked, “Would you be willing to trust the opinion of Professor Steven Pinker whose research on vision, language, and social relations was awarded prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association? Would you believe Pinker? He’s also received eight honorary doctorates, won several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard as well as numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. Prospect magazine listed Pinker among ‘The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,’ Foreign Policy named him in their ‘100 Global Thinkers,’ and Time magazine put him on their list of ‘The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.’ Would you be willing to trust the opinion of Steven Pinker?”

Pinker’s seventh (and newest) book, The Sense of Style (2014), is a general style guide for writers. He does an elegant job of explaining why academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand, and then he explains exactly what you need to do to make yourself more clearly understood. Click the book if you want to buy it on Amazon. Click this link to buy Russell’s book.