How Neuroscience can make you a Better Writer- Y. Douglas

I should have given the guy's first name in the title, but wondered whether Yellowlees would fit in. It's a great name and names, as I was forever being told throughout my therapy training, are vital to our identity and always significant.

Beware the man/woman whose name is the same as your father/mother/ex/childhood sweetheart/abusive teacher. It's the name with all its loving or tender, rejecting or scary, heart wrenching or guilty associations that is luring you in, not the person. And be even more wary of a new lover, if you discover your own name matches any of the significant people in their past. One of my ex clients startled me (somewhat of an understatement) by declaring via email that he was now living as a woman and had chosen to be called by my own name.

Amanda means `fit to be loved' and my pregnant, single mum picked it when she heard someone in an adjacent garden calling a child in for tea. I can see that it has a lilting cadence when called outside, in summer, but for everyday use (except when the interlocutor, almost invariably my mum, was angry), it's invariably shortened. Even though I've always ruled out Mandy as sounding too Barbie-like, over the years I've been called: Manda, Ami (by a German friend; it's also what they called Americans), Mand, Randa, Rands (but never Randy).

But back to Yellowlees Douglas and his wonderful book. Never start a sentence with but, I was always taught. Maybe I became a writer to be rebellious and break all the rules I'm too timid to break in real life.

I've only read the first 25 pages but this is what I've gleaned from a book that isn't as easy to read as it should be, given the subject matter, using the word `chordate' in the first sentence and the word `maven' twice on the second page! I feel he should perhaps have followed some of his own rules, but then maybe he's a rebel too:

* `Readers process sentences most easily when the verb closely follows the grammatical subject.'

*`If, God forbid, you slavishly adhere to the guideline of sentences optimally containing an average of twenty words, an entire document containing sentences of such uniform length will put your readers to sleep.'

*Here (when reading a sentence) the brain's tendency to anticipate the most common scenario dovetails rather neatly with the old chestnut beloved of professors in medical school: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.'

*`Researchers have established that readers assume that sentences that follow one another inevitably reflect events that follow one another, what linguists have dubbed the iconicity assumption.'

*`We're unable to see anything without having a schema that enables us to perceive and process what our eyes tell us.' He cites as an example, Virgil, the blind massage therapist in Oliver Sacks' `An Anthropologist on Mars'. When he regained his sight at 50, Virgil still relied on touch to decipher the `bewildering images he encountered.' He had no visual schema to make sense of the world.

What I want to know is whether Virgil managed to develop a new schema over time.