Quick and Dirty Tips

This Is How Your Brain Reacts to Porn
What's the Rule About Paragraph Length?
What Does ‘Op-Ed’ Mean?

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 12:10 AM PDT

In the past few decades, the Internet has put everything under the sun within reach ... whenever we want it. We can binge-watch every season of Friends if we wanted to. We can have toilet paper shipped to our front door. We can find out how many teeth a shark has. (It has 5 rows of teeth totaling 3000. Do what you will with that information.)

And of course, we can watch pornography. Hours and hours of sexual images and videos involving (mostly) people in every imaginable combination and location, and some unimaginable ones, too. Never before in history have we had such infinite access to so much sexual stimuli.

When governments around the world put pandemic-related stay-at-home orders in place in March 2020, weekly visits went up sharply in all the affected countries and kept climbing for months.

When COVID-19 struck, we humans took porn consumption up a notch. All the social isolation and boredom drove people to porn on a scale never seen before. In 2019, Pornhub received a whopping 42 billion visits. But when governments around the world put pandemic-related stay-at-home orders in place in March 2020, weekly visits went up sharply in all the affected countries and kept climbing for months.

So, how does porn affect our brains? A 2014 study found that men who watched more porn had less gray matter volume—they literally had smaller brains. This finding caused a whirlwind of headlines and opinions. But is it true? What does it mean? Is porn really bad for us?

As usual, the answers are complicated. Let's take a look at some interesting themes from neuroscience research on just how exactly pornography affects the way we see, think, feel, and act.

Brains on porn are different

One thing seems true: Brains on porn do appear to look and act somewhat differently. That infamous study from 2014? It found that the more porn men reported watching, the less volume and activity they had in the regions of the brain linked to reward processing and motivation, specifically the striatum.

They also found that connectivity between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex (which is the part of the brain used for decision making, planning, and behavior regulation) weakened the more porn the men reported watching. The researchers thought that, perhaps, we see these differences due to intense stimulation of the reward system, almost as if too much porn was wearing down this system and making it less sensitive.

This brain activity pattern looks awfully similar to the patterns in addiction.

Another...

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What's the Rule About Paragraph Length?

Posted: 29 Apr 2021 03:21 PM PDT

A while ago, I saw a comment on Facebook about professors who are teaching college students to make all their paragraphs the same length. The woman wrote, "There are professors at my school who deduct points, sometimes even letter grades, if paragraphs aren't the same exact length throughout a paper. Because writing should be 'balanced' and it can only achieve 'balance' if all paragraphs are equal in length."

Since this is one of the most preposterous things I've ever heard, I thought I must have misunderstood, but I asked for clarification and learned that the "uniform paragraph length rule" is so pervasive at this university that one professor uses a ruler to measure physical paragraph length in an introductory English class. Those poor students!

What Is the Purpose of a Paragraph?

Paragraphs represent ideas, and ideas come in many sizes. The most important point should be at the beginning of a paragraph—often, that point is called a topic sentence—and you use the rest of the paragraph to develop the point further.

How Long Should a Paragraph Be?

Both the Yahoo! Style Guide and the popular college handbook A Writer's Reference (originally written by Diana Hacker, and often referred to as simply Hacker) recommend an average paragraph length of 100 to 200 words, but both also note that good writers treat this as a suggestion and not a hard-and-fast rule. For example, Hacker notes that in essays, introductory and concluding paragraphs are often shorter than other paragraphs, and that in scholarly works, paragraphs are often longer, suggesting "seriousness and depth."

It's also important to mix up your paragraph length for the same reason you mix up your sentence structure: to keep your reader's eyes from glazing over. Hacker notes that the reasons behind paragraph length aren't always logical or tied to the "one idea, one paragraph" concept. Besides signaling a shift to a new idea, writers can use paragraph breaks to emphasize a point, to indicate a shift in time or place, or simply to break up text that looks too dense.

Your Audience May Determine What Your Paragraph Length Should Be

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What Does ‘Op-Ed’ Mean?

Posted: 29 Apr 2021 03:10 PM PDT

The New York Times is changing the name of its Op-Ed section to Guest Essays. It's an interesting move, but it reminded me of something many people don't know about the term "op-ed." It stands for "opposite editorial," not "opinion editorial" as many people think.

Op-Ed Pieces Run Opposite the Editorial Page

"Opposite editorial" refers to the pieces' physical position in the newspaper, not to the opinions being opposite of the newspaper's opinions, as some other people think.

These commentaries, guest essays, simply run on the page opposite the editorial page. And that is one reason the New York Times is changing the name: In the digital world, many people aren't reading the guest essays on a physical page that's opposite the editorial page, so it's not a very accurate or descriptive term anymore.

Origin of the 'Op-Ed' Page

Although the New York Times didn't start running an op-ed page until 1970, the term goes back at least to 1924, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The concept of a page that lives opposite the editorial page and features opinions from outside writers was pioneered a few years earlier in 1921 by the New York World newspaper's editor and Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer, Harold Swope.

Swope was friendly with members of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and other creative people, including Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx, who regularly met for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, and according to Etymonline, Swope's "op-ed pages launched the celebrity of many of the Algonquin Round Table writers."

I find it funny that the New York Times announcement about the change mentions that people sometimes think the term "op-ed" means opinions opposite of editorial, as in the editorial board, and doesn't mention that many...

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Friday, April 30, 2021