Article archive / December 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 4. Source pages: 13.
The Secret Life of Pronouns by James Pennebaker
I’m reading The Secret Life of Pronouns for the third time and it’s incredible. It’s an outstanding book that you can apply to your own emails and correspondence and find out aspects of your personality that you might not have realized, especially regarding how you interact with others.
Pennebaker is a well known scholar in the field of stress related disorders and therapeutic writing. He was one of the first to show that expressive writing was related to health in a variety of areas, everything from mental health to Aids. It is based on computerized text analysis of hundreds of thousands of posts, blogs, tweets, and other communications. He shows that very low level words like articles, “the,” “a,” or “and” can be just as important. We used this program and looked into predictions for people with ADHD for words and thoughts.
It is unbelievable. I highly recommend it.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.