Author: James W. Pennebaker
Title: The Secret Life of Pronouns:
What our Words Say about Us
Description: Pennebaker
and his colleagues have developed computer analysis routines that analyze our
words—our tweets, our writing, our conversations, the speeches of politicians,
and so on. He found that what we have thought are telling clues to what someone
says are not necessarily the most important indicators. The title refers to the
use of personal pronouns, chiefly “I,” “you,” and “we,” which can hold some of
the greatest influence in our speech.
Writing style: The
book is pretty well written for an account of many academic studies (I liked it
better than Ariely’s book, for example), but that’s still what it is. Again,
the correlation of types of speech to what they indicated gets confusing by the
end of the book.
Audience: Anyone
with an interest in language and language use.
Major ideas: Unconscious
indicators like use of pronouns, positive words, action words, and so on give
away a lot. It’s probably asking too much for us to be able to always be
conscious of these types of words in our own speech, or that of those with whom
we are having a conversation, but he does provide a website that can analyze
our tweets.
Wrap-up: This was an interesting read
that made me much more aware of the subtle clues I give in my written and
spoken communication. 3/5*.
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