117: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking - Interview with Julie Sedivy
About this episode
Gretchen McCulloch interviews psycholinguist Julie Sedivy about the intersection of psycholinguistics and creative writing.
Sometimes, a phrase seems to leap off the page and lodge into your mind, crisp and shining like a precious jewel. Other times, you're reading something and it just won't stick, your eyes wandering away no matter how hard you try. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, who's a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the author of two general-audience linguistics books, Memory Speaks and Linguaphile. We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down. We also do a small linguistic experiment on air using the following words, which you can play along with: luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous, pulchritude, zoo. Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 96: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking, and we’ve added an…
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