Steven Pinker Style
The Elements of Style could really use an update. Though the book is still treated as an authority on all things language, much has changed in the half-century since it first took off.
Psychologists have studied the way we read, for example by monitoring eye movements, and have figured out what kinds of writing tend to trip people up. Modern number-crunching capabilities allow us to study usage trends with mathematical precision. Advances in linguistics have revolutionized the way experts classify the components of language--if you don't know what a "determiner" is, you're missing out. And as those who closely follow grammar debates know, The Elements of Style had a lot of nonsense in it from the very beginning.
What we need is a "thinking person's guide to writing in the 21st century"--and that, as luck would have it, is the subtitle of Steven Pinker's latest book, The Sense of Style. Pinker certainly has the tools needed to summarize what we know about good writing today: He's been studying how the brain processes language for decades, and he's a terrific writer himself.
Yet somehow, the result is underwhelming. The Sense of Style certainly contains plenty of good advice, and several chapters here could be immensely helpful to a high-school- or college-age aspiring writer. But Pinker's new, scientifically validated writing style sounds a whole lot like the style that English teachers and editors have been encouraging for decades. And when it comes to those interminable usage debates that we language lovers obsess over--the things that literally make our blood boil--Pinker offers a great general approach but some questionable opinions on the specifics.
Ironically, considering his emphasis on concision, Pinker often spends far too long expounding on simple ideas. In fact, hundreds of pages here can be condensed down to a quick list of "do"s and "don't"s without losing too much:
1. Write in a conversational style. Imagine a reader who's just as smart as you are but happens not to know something you know, and explain it to them.
2. Think carefully about what it means to not know something. A lot of bad prose happens when writers assume their audience will already have a lot of background knowledge, or otherwise fail to explain things in a way that's clear to someone who's not already an expert on the topic.
3. Avoid jargon, other forms of academic-ese, and anything that makes your writing seem dense or knotted. Try reading your prose out loud and rewriting anything that trips you up.
4. Your writing should have an easy-to-follow structure that introduces ideas in a logical manner. This doesn't mean you have to do a ton of "signposting." ("First I'm going to explain this. Then I'm going to explain that.")
5. It should be clear how individual sentences relate to each other, too--add connective tissue like "because," "however," etc.
6. Think of fresh turns of phrase and clever comparisons to add flair. Don't rely on cliches.
7. Learn at least the basics of sentence diagramming; it will improve your grammar and help you identify problems in your writing.
8. Read a lot, and develop an ear for language. There's an art, for example, when it comes to repeating words, phrases, and sentence structures--sometimes it's pleasing, sometimes it grates.
All of that is perfectly good advice, but similar lists can be found on posters in classrooms throughout the country. When it comes to the most important aspects of writing, Pinker gives us the same old tips, just with updated justifications and footnotes.
But general advice is never the most fun part of a style manual. Far more interesting, at least to the type of person who actually reads style manuals, is how Pinker handles the little things.
These debates are often plagued by a false dichotomy between "prescriptivists" and "descriptivists"--in the public's imagination these are, respectively, people who think there are right and wrong answers to all language questions and people who think anything goes. But as Pinker notes, when these two groups are defined in a way that describes the approaches of actual linguists, there's no tension between them: Descriptivists study the rules speakers apply when using language in different contexts, while prescriptivists offer guidance to writers who want to use language in ways their audience will understand and see as correct.
However, it's hard to hold on to many stereotypically prescriptivist rules when one has a solid grasp of how real people speak and write. As Pinker demonstrates, good writers have always split infinitives, started sentences with conjunctions, and ended sentences with prepositions. While many amateurs overuse the passive voice, that doesn't mean professionals should avoid it entirely, and indeed professionals don't--even when they're railing against it. (George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" contains an above-average proportion of passives.) There's a long history of writers' using "they" to mean "he or she"--even Jane Austen did it--and modern experiments have shown that "he" isn't a suitable alternative: People understand it to imply that the referent is male. If you don't buy the science, just read this example Pinker provides: "I support the liberty of every father or mother to educate his children as he desires."
But these are the easy questions; beyond this point, informed people can differ. Pinker's biggest suggestion for anyone confronting a subtler issue is to look it up and weigh competing arguments, but because no one buys a book to be told to Use the Google, he feels compelled to weigh in on many of the debates directly.
Pinker's approach is usually sensible. On topic after topic, he clearly explains the grammatical issues at stake and the relevant usage history before rendering a judgment. Younger writers will especially benefit from Pinker's explanations of oft-confused words ("apprise" vs. "appraise," "flout" vs. "flaunt").
Many will find Pinker a bit lax, though. He's fine with dangling modifiers, for example, so long as they don't confuse or annoy readers. He even stops short of fully condemning the hypercorrection in which people say "So-and-so and I" when it should be "So-and-so and me." (It's "Come to the store with me," so it should also be "Come to the store with my wife and me.") His arguments on these points are nuanced, but any writer who'll be dealing with an editor or teacher is probably better off just ignoring him and following the standard rule.
More problematic are some pieces of advice Pinker gives that are likely to confuse a writer's audience. For example, the word "refute" has two meanings: "Prove to be false" and "allege to be false." So if I say that John refuted Jane's argument, I could be saying John won the debate, or I could simply be saying that John responded--and because these two meanings are closely related, it often won't be clear from context which I intended.
Pinker recommends writers use the word only in "prove" sense. This won't do: Some readers, being familiar only with the other definition, will misunderstand what the writer means, and even readers who share Pinker's preference will have no way of knowing that the writer is aware of the rule too. The more practical solution is to just not use the word at all. (It's like "bimonthly": If even dictionaries say a word can mean either "once every two months" or "twice monthly," that word is useless, and no amount of pounding the table and insisting that the older definition is the correct one will change that.)
Pinker offers similar advice on "verbal," which also has two definitions: It can mean "in linguistic form" (as in the verbal section of the SAT), or it can mean "oral" (as opposed to written). Pinker claims that the latter sense can be "confusing" and recommends that writers stick to the former, but a better policy is simply to keep in mind that there are two definitions and avoid ambiguity. Anyone who insists that a "verbal contract" can be written is just being a tool, but someone writing about "verbal skills" needs to make clear whether this refers to speaking skills or to language skills in general.
What's especially odd about these two examples is that Pinker knows they can cause problems. He himself notes that a majority of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel (which he chairs, and which comprises assorted writers, editors, and academics) is okay with the "allege" sense of "refute," and that the "oral" sense of "verbal" has existed for centuries.
And since a style guide almost by definition invites an assault on its every flaw, I'll get two more shots in: In rewriting an academic passage to make it more readable, Pinker changes the meaning by cutting the word "partly," and on page 289 he twice says "after" when he means "before."
The Sense of Style probably won't become anyone's writing bible. The general advice isn't anything new, and it's hard to beat the Internet when it comes to providing information about more specific controversies. But Pinker has something to teach the inexperienced--and those of us who write or edit for a living will, at the very least, enjoy sorting through his opinions to see what we agree with.
