How amazing is NPR? No, I'm not moonlighting as a pesky pledge drive money wrangler. I just love my daily dose of Morning Edition. You get your current events, your (usually not too maudlin) human interest, your film and book reviews, and if you were tuning in this morning, you got a tender morsel of evidence that writing--or at least, writing well, and who in the Lighthouse community doesn't strive to write well?-- could be good for your brain.
Call me a selective listener, but what I gleaned from the research presented is the fact that within the "Nun Study," those who did not write "idea-rich sentences" (examples given in the article) "were 60 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's" than those with more "grammatical complexity and idea density." In other (read: my) words: writing good sentences can save you from dementia. Now, I would be a severe disappointment to Pat, my college statistics professor, if I didn't point out that correlation does not mean causation. Just because the sisters wrote good sentences doesn't mean that it was those sentences that protected their brains. In fact, the whole point of the article is that we may be able to use people's writing samples to detect early warning signs of Alzheimer's. Still, this gal is going to take any incentive to sit down at her desk and write as a blessing.
And now for the shameless, pledge drive-like plug: if you're looking to brush up your sentences, there are still some spots left in our Lit Fest workshops. Sign up here.
