Steven Pinker?s Sense of Style

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Citation:

Pinker, S. (2014). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century . New York, NY: Penguin.

Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Do people write badly on purpose, to bamboozle their readers with highfalutin gobbledygook? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Should we bring back the lost art of diagramming sentences? Have dictionaries abandoned their responsibility to safeguard correct usage? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?

In this entertaining and instructive book, the bestselling cognitive scientist, linguist, and writer Steven Pinker rethinks the usage guide for the 21st century. Rather than moaning about the decline of the language, carping over pet peeves, or recycling spurious edicts from the rulebooks of a century ago, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.

Don?t blame the Internet, he says, or the kids today; good writing has always been hard. It begins with savoring the good prose of others. It requires an act of imagination: maintaining the illusion that one is directing a reader?s gaze to something in the world. A writer must overcome the Curse of Knowledge?the difficulty we all have in imagining what it?s like not to know something we know. Skillful writers must be sensitive to the ways in which syntax converts a tangled web of ideas into a linear string of words. They must weave their prose into a coherent whole, with one sentence flowing into the next. And they must negotiate the rules of correct usage, distinguishing the rules that enhance clarity and grace from the myths and superstitions (and thus should not be afraid to boldly split their infinitives).

Filled with examples of great and gruesome modern prose, and avoiding the scolding tone and Spartan tastes of the classic manuals, Pinker shows how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right. The Sense of Style is for writers of all kinds, and for readers who are interested in letters and literature and curious about the ways in which the sciences of mind can illuminate how language works at its best.

Steven Pinker?s Sense of Style

The Harvard psychologist offers a writing guide based on how the mind works

• By Gareth Cook on September 30, 2014

Writing guides tend to be pretty unsatisfying. They offer plenty of concrete rules, but why, a reader might ask, should the rules be followed? The answer is usually ?because? ? as in, ?because I say so.? This, of course, is where humanity found itself before the advent of the scientific method: the mystics spoke, and everyone had to decide for themselves whom to believe. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker takes a different approach, one that is both more ambitious and more modest. In his new book, ?The Sense of Style,? he draws on research, and particularly his deep knowledge of linguistics, to give his writing principles a scientific basis. Readers can thus have some assurance that Pinker?s advice is good, and, knowing the reasons why, they will be more likely to know when a rule should be broken. Yet he does not push this method beyond its natural limits. Scientists, after all, still know relatively little about the ways dark squiggles communicate ideas. Instead, he shows readers how to take apart a piece of fine writing to see what makes it tick. He does this with affection and enthusiasm. In Pinker?s hands, we do not feel ordered around capriciously, but truly guided by an inspiring teacher. He was interviewed by Gareth Cook, the editor of Mind Matters.

There are many, many books about writing in the world. What did you hope to add?
Most writing guides recycle a standard set of peeves and superstitions about usage, mixed with useful but vague guidelines like ?keep related words together.? None of them take advantage of the tremendous advances in the study of language of the past fifty years ? modern grammatical theories that are a vast improvement over the old Latin-based grammars; evidence-based dictionaries which pay attention to how language really is used; research from cognitive science on what makes sentences easy or hard to read; and historical and critical studies of usage, which trace the history of various rules (like the one against ending a sentence with a preposition) so that their rationale can be examined. I wanted to write a style manual for the 21st century.

That?s fascinating. Can you give any examples of writing lessons that come from cognitive science research?
A student press release at Yale advertised ?a panel on sex with four professors,? which sounded much racier than it was. These ambiguities are common in careless prose. Usually the unintended meaning is not humorous, just distracting, and often the ambiguity is resolvable a few words downstream, like one that I came across the other day: ?John Kerry arrived in Baghdad on Wednesday to endorse the new Iraqi government hours before President Barack Obama will address the American people about his strategy for combating ISIS militants??it sounded for a second as if he was endorsing government hours (were they now working 9-5?). Text that has a lot of local ambiguities is frustrating to read, because it constantly forces the reader to backtrack and reinterpret. One of the things that differentiates ?smooth? from ?choppy? prose is the absence of these dead ends.

The authors of traditional style guides, like Strunk and White, were dimly aware of the problem, but lacked the technical concepts to analyze it, and offered useless advice such as ?Keep related words together.? The advice is useless for the Yale sentence, the related words panel and on sex in fact are already together; disambiguating it requires moving related words apart to get a panel with four professors on sex. For that matter, if it had been a panel on drugs with four professors, then the word-moving solution would make things worse: a panel with four professors on drugs is just as misleading as the panel on sex with four professors.

Psycholinguists call these temporary ambiguities ?garden paths,? and have run hundreds of experiments on what causes them and what prevents them. In the Yale example, the problem is that the human sentence understanding process parses sentences with the help of statistically frequent word pairs that have a standard structure and meaning?in this case, sex with X,and X on drugs. A careful writer has to scan for them and recast the sentence to avoid the ambiguity. The advice is better stated as ?pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart.?

It seems that it is pretty standard, in books about writing style, to bemoan the decline of the written word. Yet you don?t. Why?
Every generation thinks that ?the kids today? are ruining the language. They confuse changes in themselves (people pay more attention to language as they get older and consume more text) with changes in the times. Studies of writing quality in student papers have shown that there has been no deterioration over the decades, and no, today?s college students don?t substitute smiley-faces and texting abbreviations for words and phrases.

You write of ?directing the gaze of the reader to something in the world she can see for herself.? Can you explain what you mean by this and how it defines your view of good writing?
The main difference between good writing and turgid mush?academese, corporatese, and so on?is that good writing is a window onto the world. The writer narrates an ongoing series of events which the reader can see for himself, if only he is given an unobstructed view. In academese, the writer?s chief goal is to defend himself against the accusation that he is naïve about his own enterprise. So academics describe what other academics do instead of what they study (?In recent years there has been increased interest in X?). They use many metaconcepts?concepts about concepts, like level, perspective, framework, and approach?instead of writing ?call the police,? they write, ?approach this problem from a law-enforcement perspective.? They turn verbs into nouns?instead of writing, ?People cooperated more,? they write, ?Levels of cooperation increased.? And they sprinkle their prose with hedges?somewhat, virtually, partially?in an attempt to get off the hook should anyone ever try to prove them wrong. +

Did working on this book change how you approach your own writing in any ways?
Yes. It made me more aware of the coherence connectors ? like ?but,? ?so,? ?after,? ?moreover,? and ?nonetheless? ? which play such an important role in weaving sentences into a coherent argument. And it made me even more dependent on modern dictionaries, which don?t just prescribe correct usage, but in their usage notes, comment insightfully on the history and range of variation in the use of a word or expression.

I really enjoyed the way the book examines examples of good writing, and then explains what makes them good. Why did you decide to do that?
When I asked some good writers which style manuals they read when they were starting out, the most common answer I got was ?none.? Good writers acquire their craft not from memorizing rules but from reading a lot, savoring and reverse-engineering good prose, and assimilating vast numbers of words, idioms, tropes, and stylistic habits and tricks. On top of that, my earlier research on irregularity reminded me how much in language is arbitrary and illogical and must be acquired not by logic or rule but by brute-force memorization?spelling and punctuation being prime examples. I wanted to emphasize how important careful reading is to good writing, so I began by letting readers eavesdrop on my stream of consciousness as I went over a few examples of prose that pleased me and tried to become conscious of what made it so good. That?s a key to becoming a good writer.

Steven Pinker?s ?The Sense of Style?

By CHARLES McGRATHOCT. 17, 2014

Credit Narrator Design

Steven Pinker, the Harvard linguist and psychologist, is one of that new breed of top-flight scientists and teachers, like the physicist Brian Greene and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who also write uncommonly well. To those of us who try to write for a living and couldn?t pass a science course, let alone teach one, such people are a little annoying. And now, not content with just poaching, Pin?ker has set himself up as a gamekeeper of sorts; he?s bringing out a manual, telling the rest of us how writing ought to be done. The title, ?The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person?s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,? suggests it?s even meant to supplant that classic text ?The Elements of Style,? by Will Strunk and E. B. White.

Though still revered, ?The Elements of Style,? to be honest, is a little dated now, and just plain wrong about some things. Strunk and White are famously clueless, for example, about what constitutes the passive voice. Their book also has some of the hectoring, preachy tone that creeps into so many discussions about writing, though it?s not as extreme as Lynne Truss?s ?Eats, Shoots & Leaves,? which declares that people who misuse apostrophes ?deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.?

Pinker is not as pithy as Strunk and White: There?s nothing in his book to rival their succinct, often-quoted dictum ?Omit needless words.? But his book is more contemporary and comprehensive than ?The Elements of Style,? illustrated with comic strips and cartoons and lots of examples of comically bad writing. His voice is calm, reasonable, benign, and you can easily see why he?s one of Harvard?s most popular lecturers. He means to take some of the anxiety out of writing, and when it comes to questions of grammar and usage, he?s a liberal, much looser and more easygoing than the copy editors at this newspaper, for example, whom he would dismiss as ?purists.? At several points in ?The Sense of Style,? Eleanor Gould, the legendary grammarian at The New Yorker, would have written in the margin, as she used to on proofs that particularly exasperated her, ?Have we completely lost our mind??

Pinker doesn?t object to dangling modifiers on principle, but only when they lead to confusion or ambiguity; doesn?t see much distinction between ?like? and ?as?; and says that ?between you and I? is ?not a heinous error.? He?d just as soon not allow ?disinterested? to mean uninterested, but he doesn?t mind ?presently? used to mean now, not soon, or ?hopefully? in the sense of ?I hope.? In general he takes the view that if a phrase or construction sounds O.K., it probably is, and that many of the mistakes the purists get so worked up over ? using ?like? with a clause, for example ? have been made for hundreds of years by writers like Shakespeare. Oddly, the one thing that really sets him off is the American custom of putting commas and periods inside quotation marks, which he says is illogical. That the alternative just looks sloppy doesn?t seem to bother him.

The book?s easygoingness extends even to the question of whether there is now more bad writing than there used to be. People have been saying this for centuries, he points out. In 1490, the printer William Caxton wrote: ?And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.? There are even some ancient Sumerian clay tablets complaining that the young don?t write as well as they used to.

The cause of most bad writing, Pinker thinks, is not laziness or sloppiness or overexposure to the Internet and video games, but what he calls the curse of knowledge: the writer?s inability to put himself in the reader?s shoes or to imagine that the reader might not know all that the writer knows ? the jargon, the shorthand, the slang, the received wisdom. He may underestimate a little how much deliberately bad writing there is, writing meant to confuse and obfuscate. Just look at the fine print at the bottom of your next credit card bill or listen to a politician in Washington reading a speech about the tax code.

And what about a passage like this, a deserving winner of the bad writing contest that used to be run by the journal ?Philosophy and Literature:

?If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ?now-all-but-?unreadable DNA? of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his RoboCop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.?

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This strikes me not as accidentally bad ? the byproduct of knowledge overload ? but as willfully, preeningly bad, making a show of how overloaded it is. There is more of this kind of prose now than you might guess from reading Pinker ? much of it, sadly, ventilating from English departments, which used to be where the style manuals came from.

Like a lot of style handbooks, Pinker?s talks more about grammar and usage than about style itself, which is harder to explain. He devotes many more pages to drooping, willow-tree-like diagrams of how the mind creates strings of words and phrases than he does to explaining what makes good writing good. Pinker advocates something he calls ?classic style,? which he says, not very helpfully, offers ?a window onto the world.? Fortunately (not fortuitously ? even though he will let you have that, too), he may be an even better reader than he is writer, and some examples he provides, including excerpts from three terrific obituaries by The Times?s own Margalit Fox, make it a little clearer what he has in mind: Classic style is direct, conversational, unfussy ? more E. B. White, say, than Vladimir Nabokov. Like White, Pinker is after clarity above all. But he also acknowledges that the transparency of classic style ? the window part ? is a bit of an illusion. Words aren?t the same thing as the objects or feelings they describe. They?re intractable sometimes, and only loosely approximate the thoughts we want them to convey. When you first learn how to do it, writing is hard, and for some of us it never gets any easier. Writing is hard because thinking is hard.

Calm, judicious, reassuring, Pinker doesn?t dwell on the difficulty. He prefers to think of writing as something that can be pleasurably mastered, like cooking or photography. (He is no doubt ridiculously proficient at those, too.) It?s possible that he doesn?t want to scare his readers off by coming on like one of those old-fashioned literary drill sergeants ? Henry Watson Fowler, say, the author of the cranky and at times harebrained ?Dictionary of Modern English Usage.? Or it may be that for Pinker, writing really isn?t a chore, which is why he can, maddeningly and seemingly without effort, turn out a smart, mostly sensible book about something that isn?t even his field.

THE SENSE OF STYLE

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