Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
    The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
    The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us

    Written by James W. Pennebaker

    Narrated by Robert Fass

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    We spend our lives communicating. In the last fifty years, we've zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to tablet computers, text messages to tweets. We generate more and more words with each passing day. Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel.In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints. Using innovative analytic techniques, Pennebaker X-rays everything from Craigslist advertisements to the Federalist Papers-or your own writing, in quizzes you can take yourself-to yield unexpected insights. Who would have predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that a world leader's use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he led his country into war? You'll learn why it's bad when politicians use "we" instead of "I," what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge's syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion. Barack Obama, Sylvia Plath, and King Lear are among the figures who make cameo appearances in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying-whether we mean them to or not.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 12, 2012
    ISBN9781452676807
    Author

    James W. Pennebaker

    James W. Pennebaker is the chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Writing to Heal and Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, which has been translated into a dozen languages. You can analyze your own language using his Web site, http://www.secretlifeofpronouns.com/

    Related to The Secret Life of Pronouns

    Related audiobooks

    Language Arts & Discipline For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Why You Need Emoji

      Jul 6, 2017

      The use of emojis has become a global phenomenon. By 2015, over 6 billion emojis1 were being sent every day by over 90 percent of the world’s online population.2 Emoji, today, dwarfs even the reach of English. For some, emojis are prompting warnings

      8 min read

    • Article

      ‘The Power Of Strangers’: What We Gain From Listening To Others

      Aug 17, 2021

      Joe Keohane, author of “The Power of Strangers,” says we gain from talking with – and especially listening to – people we don’t know.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Entrenched Perceptions

      Nov 7, 2020

      Entrenched Perceptions
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Science Of Swearing

      Dec 12, 2023

      The Science Of Swearing
      5 min read

    • Article

      Wittgenstein Vs. The Woke

      May 20, 2021

      Wittgenstein Vs. The Woke
      9 min read

    • Article

      OMG, Obsessed

      Aug 4, 2019

      OMG, Obsessed
      3 min read

    • Article

      On Mute

      Jan 20, 2023

      On Mute
      8 min read

    • Article

      On Mute

      Jan 21, 2023

      On Mute
      8 min read

    • Article

      Driven To Distraction

      Feb 20, 2022

      Driven To Distraction
      11 min read

    • Article

      Me, You, And Intimacy Too

      Feb 16, 2022

      Me, You, And Intimacy Too
      8 min read

    • Article

      Why Write?

      Oct 31, 2019

      Where does all this leave us? There can be no conclusion except that writing, aside from speaking, is the most human activity. The post Why Write? appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Multiple Intelligences

      Jun 5, 2023

      Multiple Intelligences
      17 min read

    • Article

      Speak Your Mind

      Aug 25, 2023

      Speak Your Mind
      5 min read

    • Article

      How To Build The Future Of Social Media

      May 11, 2022

      Social scientist WHAT’S WRONG WITH SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AS WE KNOW THEM? We’ve just accepted that how social media is now, is how it’s always going to be. But Facebook started as a site for college students to rate each other’s physical attractiven

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Secret Life of Pronouns

    4/5

    23 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Glancing at the title with its highlighted pronouns, one might think this is a proscriptive grammar book but one would be mistaken. It deals with sociolinguistics and how our choice of words reveals who we are, where we are and what we are doing. Words give away social class, emotional state and whether or not we are telling the truth. This book will not turn you into a walking lie detector; it is only through the use of word counting programs and computer analysis programs that our speech gives up it secrets.Pennebaker studied function words – pronouns, articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, negations and a few other small words – as found in transcribed conversations, blogs, essays, and e-mails. He likes to refer to these words as stealth words. Leaders use “I” less than followers and people who use “a, an” and “the” a lot do better in college. Younger people generally use more personal pronouns, past tense verbs and negative emotion words; older people use more articles, nouns, prepositions, future tense verbs and positive emotion words. Verbs, especially auxiliary verbs, indicate lower power status. Women use more personal pronouns and verbs, men use more big words, nouns, numbers and curse words. (You have probably already noticed some of this in your own conversations.)Several exercises, such as writing about a picture or photo, are included and Pennebaker directs the reader to try some of them at his website. Chapter 4 explores formal, analytic and narrative writing as found in literature, song lyrics, even suicide notes. Those who use a formal style tend to smoke and drink less, are concerned with power and status, and are less self-honest. Analytic writing indicates cognitive complexity, predicts higher grades, and the writer is more honest and open to new experiences and reads more. Those who use narrative writing have higher social skills, more friends and are more out-going. (It begins to sound a bit like a fortune cookie.)Pennebaker gives some examples of the descriptions people wrote when asked to write about a photo of two people at a backyard barbeque. These samples were very revealing as the writers actually said more about themselves than about the facts of the pictures. An alcoholic is sure there is a keg at the party, a recently engaged woman is sure the couple is happily married and a politically active student “knows” the couple is having a political conversation. He even “knows” which candidate each supported for president. (Projection is a well-known psychological phenomenon.) We are all familiar with the truth coming out via Freudian slips. People telling the truth tend to relate stories with more details and more pronouns while fabricators use more emotion words. Those who are innocent say “I” more while those who are guilty use more third person pronouns. Pennebaker also mentions the University of Washington study which was able to predict whether a marriage would last just by analyzing the couple’s interactions. Respect, positive emotions and avoiding accusations are related to marital harmony. Dismissive comments, avoidant behavior and personal attacks did not bode well for the relationship. This goes along with language style matching (LSM) in which speakers adjust their speaking style to that of their listeners. High LSM accounts for regional speech differences and is not just found in happy couples: “when playing or watching sports, people tend to talk about the game.” (Someone please alert the media.)The last chapter is a hodge-podge, jumping from who wrote some of the Federalist papers (he analyzed them but still isn’t sure who wrote eleven of the anonymous papers), to Beatles’ lyrics (they did come together over time) to U.S. Presidents (G. W. Bush is interested in people, Reagan was a disinterested story teller and Obama is very self-confident).Following the last chapter is an eight page “Handy Guide for Spotting and Interpreting Function Words in the Wild.” He suggests that you may want to tear out these pages and carry them with you but I do not think that would be very helpful. If you are trying to count someone’s pronouns you won’t be paying attention to what they are saying and the relationship will be in jeopardy. Pennebaker’s style tends to vary throughout the book. Sometimes he presents information in a formal manner and other times he seems to be channeling a magazine cover: “Find Out What Kind of Friend/Parent/Lover You Are: Take Our Quiz!”. These sentences taken from a single paragraph give an idea of the variability in his writing. “Most important, language analyses can shed light on historical events in new ways. (. . .) The historical questions that can be answered are limited only by the availability of language samples and the researchers’ imaginations. (. . .) Did St. Paul really write all the letters attributed to him in the Bible? (Nope—not a chance.) Has Lady Gaga had an affair with Tom Cruise? (No idea. Hope not.)”As for my final analysis, I find the subject matter very interesting but I did not care for Pennebaker’s writing style or his facile Psych 101 examples and conclusions.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is an engrossing book on how we humans use language, not realize many of the subtle ways we are communicating without realizing what we are really doing. Our use of pronouns vary based on social status, group identification, and emotional state. For instance, he compares John Kerry's greater use of we-words when campaigning for president against George Bush, who used a greater number of I-words. Bush was able to project a friendlier style to the voting public. Pennebaker calls short words like pronouns stealth words. You learn how to use them early in life and are unaware of what they reveal about you.Pennebaker makes an interesting compariosn of pronouns right after 9-11. He was able to look through many hundreds of blogs to compute word usage. Initially, first day, people used I words, reflecting their fear and other emotions right on top of the event. Then people shifted quickly into we words, reflecting the desire for collective action on the part of many people. After a number of months, people returned to the use of pronouns that existed before 9-11.For verbs Pennebaker gives an example of three differently written excuses: 1. I finished my homework, but the dog ate it. 2. I had finished the homework, but the dog must have eaten it. 3. The homework was finished but must have been eaten by the dog.The first has a good chance of being true, the second one raises suspicians about statement, the third one is probably a an outright lie. The first one is straightforward, the second represents incomplete actions, the third one is filled with the passive voice. With all of Pennebaker's emphasis on grammar, there was a paragraph at the top of Page 244 that I wanted to correct due to the drilling in me as a child of the proper use of the accusative (or objective) case in English. He states: I can usually make a reasonable guess who she (his wife) is talking to by her cadence, volume, tone, and even accent. I would have used the word "whom", as I was trained in this. I wish Pennebaker had made some comment on this reaction that some of us seem to have. I seldom correct people, but after reading this book, I am noticing more often people's use of the objective case in pronouns. But I like the idea of grammatical case, and even see a stealth ablative in words like thence and whence.
    • 5/5
      The Secret Life of Pronouns by James W. Pennebaker, Professor and Head, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas, is an intriguing account of the big impact of small words on personality. As he notes in his Preface, “pronouns, articles, prepositions, and a handful of other small, stealthy words reveal parts of [our] personality, thinking style, emotional state, and connections with others.” The ‘function’ words as he calls them, include: ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, ‘but’, ‘not’, ‘for’, and ‘over’, to list a few, and these serve not only as parts of speech but also as keys to personality traits and social connections. An example: The most frequently spoken word in English, ‘I’, is used more often by followers than by leaders. Contrasted with function is the style, or ‘content’ words: nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives, which words provide common understanding of things, or objects, and actions and modifications to same.Professor Pennebaker is a social psychologist who has crossed over into several disciplines: linguistics, computer and information technology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy among others, to establish the hypothesis that these ‘stealth’ words reveal or reflect psychological states. The impetus for such inter-disciplinary work was the advent of computer technology and the program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). The LIWC analytic tool has been used by Pennebaker and his colleagues to describe gender differences, especially the language of sex, age, and social class, and in determining personality attributes, as well as in emotional trauma, lie detection, status and leadership hierarchies, and even the language of love. A most revealing example of the value ‘invisible’ function words in the context of content words is Pennebaker’s analysis of word usage and frequency in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. One might think after reading the text that its most frequently used words are ‘nation’, ‘war’, ‘men’, or possibly ‘dead’, but in actuality the most commonly used word is ‘that’ (12 times or 4.5%), ‘the’ (4.1%), ‘we’ (3.7%), ‘here’ (3.5%), ‘to’ (3.0%), a (2.6%), and (2.2%), and ‘can’, ‘for’, ‘have’, ‘it’, ‘not’, ‘of’, ‘this’ (1.9% each) – fourteen little words comprising 37% of the text. Only one content word, ‘nation’ is among the top fifteen frequently used words (used twice or 1.9%). By extension, according to Pennebaker, the list of common stealth or function words in our English language includes some 450, or just over half (55%) of all the words used. Moreover, most of these words are of three letters or less! If character is fate in that elegant rendering by Novalis of a fragment from sage Herakleitos, then language reveals character, and The Secret Life of Pronouns is testament to this. I highly recommend this book for its wit, delight, and good sense to those who want to continue to be careful with their words.
    • 4/5
      I found the topic fascinating and the book is packed with all sorts of interesting discoveries about how our use of function words reflects our personalities, social status, gender, and so on. The author is clearly enthusiastic about the topic, although the book is a little heavy on the statistics for general reading. But after a bit, I realized that you need access to his computer program and the ability to feed it a ton of text to be able to analyze anything yourself—there's almost nothing that the average reader is going to be able to do with this.I ran into additional frustrations because I read this as an e-book. Charts and tables weren't quite where the text promised they'd be; they were too small to read easily on the e-reader screen; the author would discuss specific words in a passage that were bolded in the text, but the bolding was hard to see in the e-book text; and so on. If you have a choice of formats, read this one in paper.
    • 3/5
      What can you know about me from analyzing this review? As it turns out, quite a lot. Professor Pennebaker has devoted much of his career to linking word patterns to individual characteristics. Pronoun patterns in particular tip off the savvy analyst to the writer's gender, for example. A psychologist by training, his work uses the tools of rhetorical analysis to study some enduring questions in his field. Pennebaker and his students take advantage of a relatively new and increasingly useful research paradigm in their work. Rather than divide questions into small painstakingly researched hypotheses, the new research takes advantage of the speed and accuracy of computers to identify patterns in large databases. In this case, the databases are collections of writings of students and others whose identities can be linked with other known characteristics (think gender, attitudes, level of depression, and so on). Can word patterns predict individual characteristics? The point of the book is that they can. Of what practical use is this type of analysis? Pennebaker suggests that word patterns reveal the self in ways that might not be conscious for the individual. Imagine being able to run a presidential candidate's speech through a sophisticated computer program to find out that he has a dangerous bias toward aggressive action.As a social scientist, I was especially interested in some of Pennebaker's ingenious methods of ferreting out the meaning of word patterns. One important issue is the power of his research methods. He often achieves significant results by using enormous samples. However, sometimes the effect sizes are less than exciting. As a veteran researcher, I see this as a problem. Sometimes significant results extracted from large samples just are not terribly important; they represent mild tendencies as opposed to tight connections.
    • 3/5
      James Pennebaker, Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, has spent a long time studying how people use words. He and his students have gathered an impressive collection of studies on the relationships between word use and gender, personality, emotions, etc. The Secret Life of Pronouns is his popularization of the work. Generally, I thought his ideas were interesting, though hardly Earth-shaking in scope or technique. The main method is through computerized word counts and a bit deeper analysis combined with standard techniques to match statistical patterns of use to various psychological and sociological characteristics. I struggled through the book with two issues: - Pennebaker uses small percentage differences between word use by, for example, males and females to draw distinctions. From this, he makes some pretty serious claims - like being able to tell whether a person is male or female from a relatively small sample. I agree that he can probably tell with some statistical uncertainty, and I believe he certainly understands that his conclusions about the source of a writing sample are statistically based. But in his text, he states very definitively on more than a few occasions that he absolutely can distinguish details of the writing sample source. This is disingenuous and takes away from the book. - The book doesn't give much real information about the statistics behind what he's claiming, nor does he ever really address issues associated with misinterpretation such as variations in an author's texts that are intended. All in all, it's worth a read, but because of these two issues, I can't give it more than 3 stars.
    • 5/5
      The reviews by those lucky enough to have received this book from LT's Early Reviewers Program are very good. Let me just add my two cents' worth by saying that I loved this book. It is well-written, engaging, easy and fun to read and absolutely fascinating!
    • 4/5
      This was a solid read, though I was expecting something more in line with the likes of Steven Pinker and psycholinguistics than word-based psychology. I especially wasn't sure what to think, given that my previous familiarity with Pennebaker was with his expressive writing studies and his physical health/mental health connections. However, once I got over the shock of it being much more psychology-oriented than linguistics-oriented, it was an interesting read.This didn't read like the usual piece of science-for-the-masses nonfiction book; rather, Pennebaker wrote in a style that was approachable and informal—but I felt like it needed a tad more formality. The idea behind the exercises and the website integration was interesting, but it felt more sales-pitch and less this-is-neat, and, more importantly, less integrated and more jarring.However, it is an intriguing piece of work, and the field itself seems to have a lot of promise, even if it likely shouldn't be used as anything more than a parlor trick at this point. This book makes me excited for the future of the field.
    • 3/5
      Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy. Basic thesis: knowing how often people use pronouns, articles, helper verbs, and other countable things can predict a lot about them. This is an easy read, and has some surprises: people who use “I” a lot are more likely to be low-status than high, whereas “we”-users are more likely to be high-status. As is usual with pop science, while Pennebaker is open about the fact that his results are bell-curved, there’s pressure to take more away than the science really supports: women talk like this and men like that, which is true only in gross, and “good” predictions of gender from analyzing written text run in the 65%-75% range, where 50% is chance. He’s clearest about this when he’s discussing lie detection: in situations where there is external validation of truth-telling or lying (people convicted of perjury v. people initially convicted whose convictions were overturned based on DNA or other evidence of innocence), analyzing what kinds of words people use and how complex their sentences are again predicts truth about 70% of the time, again better than chance but hardly a magic bullet. His results also show the importance of context: not only do people talk differently in different situations, they routinely mirror each other’s styles (at least when things are going well), and when you assign them a high status they start talking like high-status people (and vice versa). So, he suggests, our ways of talking are more diagnostic than they are anything else; he’s skeptical of deliberate attempts to change ways of talking without more direct intervention into ways of thinking, though that would be an interesting set of experiments and one I’d definitely like to read about.
    • 3/5
      An interesting look at what subtext is provided by our choice of words. Ultimately the book is merely an academic exercise for those of us without multi-million dollar linguistic analysis software, but the learnings obtained from a linguistic analysis of many disparate sources including blogs and college admission essays, among other sources are fascinating to uncover. A little dry at times, it was an interesting enough subject to keep me pushing through to the end of the book.
    • 4/5
      James W. Pennebaker is a social psychologist who has spent a lot of time using computers to look for revealing patterns in people's written and spoken word use. He doesn't concentrate on the words you'd probably expect, though: the meaty, substantial nouns and verbs that convey most of the overt meaning of language. Instead, he finds subtler meanings in what he calls "functional words," all those little bits of language that hold sentences together but that we normally pay very little attention to, such as articles and prepositions.Here's a small sample of his findings:
    • Women use more personal pronouns (such as "he" and "she") than men do, while men use more articles ("a" and "the"). The conclusion seems to be that women, statistically speaking, talk more about people and men more about objects. (There are, of course, multiple possible explanations for this.)
    • When two people of different social status are talking -- e.g. a boss and an employee -- the low-status person uses the word "I" much more frequently, while the high-status one uses "you" more often.
    • People who are lying tend to use "I" less often and to use less complex sentences than people telling the truth, among a number of other differences. Most people can't tell the difference at much more than chance levels, but Pennebaker has a computer program that he claims can manage about 75% accuracy. Which is not exactly a super-reliable lie detector, but is impressive, nonetheless
      • All of which is interesting stuff, and there are quite a few other intriguing tidbits in here, as well. Unfortunately, though, I didn't find the book as a whole nearly as fascinating a read as I'd hoped. Pennebaker may be an expert on other people's word choices, but I didn't necessarily find his own style all that gripping, and a lot of the examples he uses to illustrate his points aren't particularly great. The book also seems a bit padded in places. It's not really that long -- less than 300 pages, minus the end matter -- but it seemed to me it could have been a fair bit shorter without losing much.I also wish he'd gone into some of his methodology a bit more. Obviously, this is a book written for the layman, not a scientific paper, but some of the things it does that annoy me could have been easily avoided. For instance, early in the book, there are a number of tables comparing what percentage of the time certain groups used certain words... but he doesn't always include the number of subjects in the study, which renders those numbers pretty much meaningless. And in the sections on personality and emotions, he makes some claims about how certain patterns of word use track with certain personality traits or emotional states, but, while he goes into detail about how the word patterns were measured, he often doesn't discuss how the presence of those personality traits or emotions were determined. In some cases, he almost gives the impression that it's based on nothing more than his own assumptions from reading the writing samples. Hopefully that's not actually true, but there's no way to tell. Fortunately, most of the rest of the book is better on that score, but since those sections come early on, it left me with a lingering mistrustful feeling I never entirely managed to overcome.Still, while some of the conclusions seem much more solid than others -- which is probably inevitable in a squishy field like psychology -- and while Pennebaker might oversell some of his ideas a little bit, this kind of computerized word analysis does seem like an interesting and potentially useful tool, and some of the things he does with it are kind of nifty.
  • 5/5
    I was prepared to be bored by this book. Why? Well because so many books promising similar things have been boring, dull, and anything by interesting. I can say that I was very happily proven WRONG – right away.This book is fascinating, and is written in a very engaging manner. You will be reading parts (or maybe all of it) out loud to your significant other, or maybe even the poor unsuspecting person sitting next to you on the bus.Will you be looking at your e-mails differently after reading this book? Will you double check the texts & IM’s from your loved ones? Checking out the lyrics of your favorite songs? Most probably. This isn’t a book about words so much as it is a book about how language reflects who we are at any given moment. Some things are obvious and some findings are totally counter-intuitive. All of them are quite fascinating.
  • 2/5
    Graphology is the pseudoscience of analyzing handwriting for personality traits. Bunk, but still out there (pardon the pun.) Think of this as graphology with words, or so Dr. Pennebaker would have you believe. Not what I expected, but I've slept enough since I added to my queue ... two years ago? ... that I don't remember what I expected.

    Pennebaker is a psychologist who studies, among other things, language parts. He's not a linguist, if the bios I checked are accurate, and that is clear. Neither am I but I know that Every language must be able to distinguish between "a table" and "the table," between "she" and "he," and between "going to a store" and "going by a store."is not true. Pennebaker continues "In some languages these distinctions are signaled by separate function words and in others, they are added to a surrounding noun or verb." And in some languages, there are none of the distinctions he claims to be universal - some have no articles, gender, location modifiers - and everything is entirely based on context. (And the native speakers have no problems understanding.) Pennebaker seems to understand only English, which is the only language I understand, so I could conclude that's okay if I abandoned my normal critical eye. Analyzing Osama bin laden in Arabic might yield something of value (but it seems more of begging the question, or self-fulfilling to conclude that bin Laden had "supreme self-confidence"), but to claim that in English translations the result is the same? Translations lose context, nuances, and a whole lot more, thus are really not good source data. But I'm not the scientist specializing in this.

    He says Most languages are constructed to identify who in a conversation has greater status or respect. I Old English, our linguistic ancestors distinguished between you and thou.
    Um...Old English was more like German than anything resembling English. Someone studying languages should know that (Middle English, maybe) and not make such a silly claim.

    Pennebaker makes statements, without direct qualification, without detailed reference cites ("Now that this has been established...", and ...nothing...except a note about a paper he co-authored...)

    Not recommended.