writing style and human perception/cognition

I was looking something up in Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, and I ran across my favorite example of how important writing style is:

If you doubt that style is something of a mystery, try rewriting a familiar sentence and see what happens. Any much-quoted sentence will do. Suppose we take "These are the times that try men's souls." Here we have eight short, easy words, forming a simple declarative sentence. The sentence contains no flashy ingredient such as "Damn the torpedoes!" and the words, as you see, are ordinary. Yet in that arrangement, they have shown great durability. Now compare a few variations:

Times like these try men's souls.
How trying it is to live in these times!
These are trying times for men's souls.
Soulwise, these are trying times.

It seems unlikely that Thomas Paine could have made his sentiment stick if he had couched it in any of these forms. But why not? No fault of grammar can be detected in them, and in every case the meaning is clear. Each version is correct, and each, for some reason that we can't readily put our finger on, is marked for oblivion. We could, of course, talk about "rhythm" and "cadence," but the talk would be vague and unconvincing. We could declare soulwise to be a silly word, inappropriate to the occasion; but even that won't do -- it does not answer the main question. Are we even sure soulwise is silly? If otherwise is a serviceable word, what's the matter with soulwise?

Again, I think it's one of these things that the human perception and processing system is so good at. In just one sentence, there is an intense amount of information laced within: the words the writer chooses, the order the words are placed in, the linguistic sounds of the words, the connotations that surround the meanings of each individual word, the context that surrounds the sentence as a whole, the tone the sentence is read in, and the ever mysterious style component, just to name a handful. A good amount of the information is all already stored in the brain. Reading that one sentence triggers all of the retrieval mechanisms to pull all the meaning together to create one particular impression in our minds, and it all happens faster than we can blink. I can't even fathom how much work it would take to get a computer system to do anything close to that.

Reading that one passage out of Strunk and White and thinking about perception and cognition reminded me about a new book I hope to get a copy of and read soon, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things can Make a Big Difference, which I really enjoyed).

On a related subject, I found out recently that Emotional Design by Don Norman (whose work on human-centered design I really respect) is out on paperback now. I really enjoyed the sample PDF chapters (Prologue: Three Teapots, Chapter 1: Attractive Things Work Better, and Epilogue: We Are All Designers) last year and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of his book soon.

Just as an aside, White from Strunk and White is E.B. White, essayist for The New Yorker, and author of three children's books: Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan. I'll leave you with one of his quotes: "I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."