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

Steven Pinker (2014)

In a paragraph

Good style allows writers to get their messages across, earn trust and add beauty to the world. Non-fiction writing should be in Classic Style, aiming to engage the reader in conversation and make it easy for the reader to see what is being presented.  A writer should be well read, should take care to avoid the Curse of Knowledge and to be coherent, and should be aware of syntax trees and some prescriptive rules.

Key points

• Style matters. It ensures that writers get their messages across, it earns trust and it adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase is among life’s greatest pleasures.

• Good writers are avid readers. Writing well can be a form of pleasurable mastery, like cooking or photography.  Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game. 

• All writing is a simulation, but in different styles. Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner propose Classic Style which takes the metaphor of seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself.  Treat the reader as an equal and make it easy and vivid for her to see what you are presenting. A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation. 

• Beware the Curse of Knowledge. Inevitably we’ll bore a few at the top while baffling a few at the bottom; the only question is how many there will be of each.

• Only after laying a semblance of it on the page can a writer free up the cognitive resources needed to make the sentence grammatical, graceful, and, most important, transparent to the reader. The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not somuch on how to write as on how to revise. 

• Syntax, then, is an app that uses a tree of phrases to translate a web of thoughts into a string of words, a linear ordering of phrases which conveys a gnarly network of ideas.

• Thematic consistency.  Parallel phrases. Look things up.

• Prescriptive rules are the conventions of a specialized form of the language.  Even the sticklers can’t agree on how to stickle.  And for all the vitriol brought out by matters of correct usage, they are the smallest part of good writing. They pale in importance behind coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness. 

Comments 

A useful book, for setting out the principles of Classic Style that Pinker employs so well, and for seeing Pinker’s expert but moderate views on questions of grammar.

NOTES

Prologue

The ways in which the sciences of mind can illuminate how language works at its best. 

You can write with clarity and with flair, too. 

Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their messages across,second, style earns trust.  Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures. 

Chapter 1: Good Writing

Good writers are avid readers. 

Why not think of it as a form of pleasurable mastery, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game. 

The opening lines of Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow ‘We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.’ Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché,  not with a banality, but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.  In six sentences Dawkins has flipped the way we think of death, and has stated a rationalist’s case for an appreciation of life in words so stirring that many humanists I know have asked that it be read at their funerals. 

In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity: ‘A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether?’ This passage fills my eyes every time I read it, and not just because it is about a sister-in-law I will never meet. 

Wilkerson trains a magnifying glass on the historical blob called “the Great Migration” and reveals the humanity of the people who compose it. 

The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood. They write as if they have something important to show. 

Chapter 2: A Window onto the World

The written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond. 

Which simulation should a writer immerse himself in when composing a piece for a more generic readership? 

The literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner have singled out one model of prose as an aspiration for such writers today. They call it classic style, and explain it in a wonderful little book called Clear and Simple as the Truth. 

The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself.  A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation. 

Let’s see how classic style is used by the physicist Brian Greene to explain one of the most exotic ideas the human mind has ever entertained, the theory of multiple universes. Just as deceptive is the plain language of Greene’s explanation of the multiverse. It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate. 

The confident presentation of an idea in classic style should not be confused with an arrogant insistence that it is correct. 

And for all its directness, classic style remains a pretense, an imposture, a stance. Even scientists, with their commitment to seeing the world as it is, are a bit postmodern. They recognize that it’s hard to know the truth, that the world doesn’t just reveal itself to us, that we understand the world through our theories and constructs, which are not pictures but abstract propositions, and that our ways of understanding the world must constantly be scrutinized for hidden biases. It’s just that good writers don’t flaunt this anxiety in every passage they write; they artfully conceal it for clarity’s sake. 

The art of classic prose is to signpost sparingly, as we do in conversation, and with a minimum of metadiscourse. One way to introduce a topic without metadiscourse is to open with a question: For good writers, their hedging is a choice, not a tic. 

Classic prose is a pleasant illusion, like losing yourself in a play. The writer must work to keep up the impression that his prose is a window onto the scene rather than just a mess of words. Like an actor with a wooden delivery, a writer who relies on canned verbal formulas will break the spell. 

Often a writer needs to steer the reader’s attention away from the agent of an action. The passive allows him to do so.

Chapter 3: The Curse of Knowledge

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. 

Like a drunk who is too impaired to realize that he is too impaired to drive, we do not notice the curse because the curse prevents us from noticing it. 

Inevitably we’ll bore a few at the top while baffling a few at the bottom; the only question is how many there will be of each. 

The curse of knowledge, in combination with chunking and functional fixity, helps make sense of the paradox that classic style is difficult to master. 

The reason it’s harder than it sounds is that if you are enough of an expert in a topic to have something to say about it, you have probably come to think about it in abstract chunks and functional labels that are now second nature to you but still unfamiliar to your readers—and you are the last one to realize it. 

Only after laying a semblance of it on the page can a writer free up the cognitive resources needed to make the sentence grammatical, graceful, and, most important, transparent to the reader. The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise. 

Chapter 4: The Web, The Tree, and The String

Syntax, then, is an app that uses a tree of phrases to translate a web of thoughts into a string of words. A linear ordering of phrases which conveys a gnarly network of ideas.

A writer must constantly reconcile the two sides of word order: a code for information, and a sequence of mental events. 

As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully

The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily recovered by a reader. It’s a syntactic version of the curse of knowledge. 

Parsing. Structural parallelism. Save the heaviest for last. 

Topic, then comment. Given, then new. 

Chapter 5: Arcs of Coherence

Don’t bury the lede.

“Avoid elegant variation” or “Don’t use a word twice on one page”?

Coherence 

Every negation requires mental homework, and when a sentence contains many of them the reader can be overwhelmed. 

Thematic consistency.

There is a big difference between a coherent passage of writing and a flaunting of one’s erudition, a running journal of one’s thoughts, or a published version of one’s notes. 

Chapter 6: Telling Right from Wrong

Prescriptive rules are the conventions of a specialized form of the language, 

The fact that many prescriptive rules are worth keeping does not mean that every pet peeve, bit of grammatical folklore, or dimly remembered lesson from Miss Thistlebottom’s classroom is worth keeping. 

The answer is unbelievably simple: look it up. 

“split infinitive” 

There is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with a coordinator. 

The accusative is the default case in English.

Past-tense form is typically used to refer to past time, but it can also be used with a second meaning, factual remoteness  The past tense has a third meaning in English: a backshifted event in a sequence of tenses.  Consistent vantage point. ‘Whether he be rich or poor’ is subjunctive.  ‘If I were a rich man’ is irrealis (‘not real’). 

‘were’ conveys a somewhat stronger sense of remoteness than ‘was’ does, 

Nonrestrictive relative clauses take which; restrictive relative clauses take that. But there is nothing wrong with using which to introduce a restrictive relative clause, 

In a very real sense such neologisms make it easier to think. 

Comparisons of supposedly absolute adjectives are not illogical

The grammatical number of a noun phrase can depend on whether the writer conceives of its referent as singular or plural.  Americans do a double take when they read: ‘The government are listening at last.’ 

‘Between’ is used for a relationship of an individual to any number of other individuals, as long as they are being considered two at a time, whereas ‘among’ is used for a relationship of an individual to an amorphous mass 

Singular they. 

Even the sticklers can’t agree on how to stickle. 

He is his mothers’ son. But Charles’s son.

The closing quotation mark goes outside the comma or period, “like this,”  Wikipedia has endorsed the alternative called Logical Punctuation. 

And for all the vitriol brought out by matters of correct usage, they are the smallest part of good writing. They pale in importance behind coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness. 

First, look things up.  We are blessed to live in an age in which no subject has gone unresearched by scholars, scientists, and journalists. The fruits of their research are available within seconds to anyone with a laptop or smartphone, and within minutes to anyone who can get to a library. Why not take advantage of these blessings and try to restrict the things you know (or at least the things you write) to things that are true? 

Second, be sure your arguments are sound. If you’re making a moral argument—a claim about what people ought to do—you should show how doing it would satisfy a principle or increase a good that reasonable people already accept. 

The reasons to strive for good style: to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world.