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

Summary (from the publisher): 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. 

Review: This book sort of reminded me of a linguistic version of The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan & Barbara Pease, but somewhat less interesting of a read. Pennebaker, a social psychologist has spent years studying language use through a computer program that tracks the way and number of time different individuals use pronouns, articles, etc. Apparently, he's found that you can pretty reliably predict age, gender, social status, and more based on the way an individual uses language. This book is filled with various examples from Sylvia Plath to Barack Obama to instant messages between couples to predict the life of a relationship.

While I found the results of Pennebaker's studies fascinating - like an inside look at how we interact and what we're really communicating when we do so - I felt sort of mislead by the title and description of this book. For one, this is not just about pronouns at all. It does talk significantly about the use of I words versus we words and what the rates of use mean, but the book also spends a lot of time on articles, nouns, verbs, and large versus small words. Also, I was frustrated that the vast majority of the results are based on computer analysis. In other words, short of running your conversations through Pennebaker's computer program, you can't put what you've learned in this book to use when talking to others in everyday life.  

Overall, Pennebaker's studies have led to very interesting findings. Like our largely unconscious reading of other's body language, humans also unconsciously and subtly pick up on clues in other people's words within seconds of beginning a conversation and respond accordingly. It's fascinating learning more about what our brains already know unconsciously. 

Stars: 3.5