Translator: TED Translators admin Reviewer: English Unplugged
Please welcome to the TEDx Sonoma County stage Kelly Corrigan
(Applause)
So I have to be honest,
I’m not feeling very good about my prospects right now.
I don’t have a ukulele player,
I don’t have a beret,
I can’t do that dance that that guy did from the gospel
and I am the last thing between you and your five o’clock drink.
(Laughter)
Let me give you five facts.
Thirty-three percent of high school graduates
never read a book after graduation.
In college the number goes to forty-two percent.
When the state of Arizona forecasts how many beds they need for their prisons,
they look to the number of kids in fourth grade who read well.
The number one cause of divorce is poor communication.
And the number one predictor of occupational success is vocabulary.
So my message today for individuals and couples and families,
for workforces, electorates, and communities is read more.
(Applause)
Read personal narrative, read poetry, read op-ed,
read Doris Kearns Goodwin
and Louisa May Alcott and Captain Underpants.
There are so many good reasons to read,
there’s a whole set of physiological benefits
similar to what you get from meditation
so there is lowered stress and deeper sleep and reduced memory loss.
And then there’s the places that a book can take you
that time and money and reality sometimes prohibit
like Xerox Park, or Gosford Park, or Jurassic Park.
And then there are the people you can meet
in the pages of a book.
You know you can walk the jungle with Coronel Kurtz
or skip to the tea party with the Mad Hatter
or storm the boardroom waving a tiny phone with Steve Jobs.
Reading is the ultimate neurobiological workout.
It is to the brain what exercises is to the body.
I could stop right there and the case for reading would be made,
but there’s another reason that I want to talk about today,
and that is to read for the words.
The consequences of a robust working vocabulary seem small
but there’re actually many and meaningful.
Before I get to them,
let me just make the link quickly between reading and vocabulary.
After fourth grade your vocabulary basically develops exclusively
from reading and that’s because written language is so much more diverse
than spoken conversation.
If you were to read for thirty minutes a day for a year,
you would be exposed to two million words used in context.
And they say conservatively that five percent of those words
would be new to you or unfamiliar or rarely used words.
So that’s a hundred thousand such words
that you’re going to see in a year. Let’s say you only retain a hundred,
but let’s also say that you’re not one of the thirty-three percent
of the high school graduates who never read another book again
and let’s also say that you’re getting ready to go to your 30-year reunion.
That means that you have been exposed to thousands of new words
and you’ve incorporated them into your own personal arsenal.
That has…that matters.
that adds up.
So as I said at the top, one of the things it does for us
is predict occupational success.
And it has been proven that achievement precedes the vocabulary
rather than it being a result of.
And at first it seemed so far-fetched to me that that would be the case
but then it seemed so obvious the more I sat with it.
I mean how we communicate has such a huge influence over
how we are perceived
and how we are perceived has such a huge influence over how we behave
and how we behave over time becomes basically who we are,
to our colleagues and within our profession.
And it all starts with word choice.
Two a strong working vocabulary
is the best defense we have against manipulation
both commercial and political.
So take for example the whole ballot measure business.
So you’ve got a team of word Smiths that are trying to come up
with the perfect exact phrasing for that ballot measure, then you’ve got
a whole set of media working to translate that into new language
and there you are the voter in the booth having to parse those words to made sure
that you can accurately vote your conscience.
That takes a strong vocabulary.
Take for another example listening to a debate.
We need to be able to hear and instantly recognize the motives
behind choosing certain words over others.
For instance affirmative action over reverse discrimination
or illegal immigrant over undocumented worker
or disability over difference.
The third reason, as my husband said,
is that language literally defines our palette of possible thought.
As Helen Keller said, perhaps more beautifully, no offense Hun
(Laughter)
She said, well first she considered herself like a wild animal
until she got her hands on words
you know, she first learned braille and then she learned to sign
and then finally she could vocalize.
And she said language sets thoughts aster
and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.
And I learned this for myself.
In 1993 I came out to California from Philadelphia
and I started grad school at night to get a masters in English Lit.
My first professor was a guy named Michael Krasny
who you might know – you know – from public radio
Michael Krasny is a lucid articulate man
and I will tell you that in three months of those classes
he introduced us to concepts as far and wide as cognitive dissonance
and schadenfreude and intentional fallacy,
agnosticism and relativism,
solecism and those concepts that he drew with an architect’s precision
with that uncanny verbal acumen of his are now mine.
They are in my palette of possible thoughts forever.
And fourth, which is my favorite reason,
Having a strong vocabulary allows you to do the thing
that fifty plus years of social science tells us is the key to well-being;
make meaningful connections to others.
The strength of our connections, the quality of our connections
totally hinges on our emotional intelligence and EQ starts with words.
How accurately and unambiguously can we identify and distinguish
and convey our feelings to another.
Was the lie insidious or was it shrewd?
Did it make you anxious or cautious?
Language allows for that potent divine moment between friends
when we both understand and are understood.
The "Exactly Moment" where I say “I don’t know it was just,
I was so disappointed, but it was more than that”
"You were disillusioned."
“Exactly, that’s exactly how I felt”
And so Word Nerds our job is clear.
(Laughter and Applause)
Only in TED do you get a clap for calling everybody a nerd.
Our job is to go out there and help our families and our spouses
and ourselves our workplaces, our electorate, our communities read more,
so that we may be able to achieve and evaluate
to think and connect
so that we might keep building the bridge
that Ian Forrester said is so essential,
the between the prose in us and the passion.
Without it he said, we are meaningless fragments:
half monks, half beasts.
Thank you
(Applause)