James W. Pennebaker | Bloomsbury Press

The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
By James W. Pennebaker
(Bloomsbury Press, $28)

What we say and write says a lot about ourselves — not just the meaning of the words but also the types of words we use. In The Secret Life of Pronouns, linguist and social psychologist James W. Pennebaker shows what the number of pronouns we use reveals about our gender, age, class and self-image. In the book, Pennebaker, who has been analyzing the content of writing and speech for two decades, examines everything from the Federalist Papers to modern-day blogs, which all point to the same thing: Our you’s and we’s say more than you or we could ever imagine.