Sensible Style: Writing in the 21st Century

Last week I reread Steven Pinker's THE SENSE OF STYLE (2014), subtitled "The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century." All writers could enjoy and benefit from it. Although addressed mainly toward nonfiction writers, it contains plenty of material also useful to authors of fiction. Pinker, a psychologist who specializes in linguistics and cognitive science, has written several other books about language. This one isn't a conventional style manual with exhaustively comprehensive rules for punctuation, grammar in the narrow high-school-English sense, and diction (word usage), although he does delve into those areas toward the end. THE SENSE OF STYLE goes much deeper. It has only six chapters, some rather long, though they include marked divisions where the reader can pause as desired. Chapter One, "Good Writing," sets the stage with several examples of professional work that illustrate the title of the chapter. Pinker's analysis of what makes these passages "good" foreshadows the tone of the entire book -- thoughtful, humane, highlighting the positive rather than hammering on the negative. Chapter Two defines and analyzes what he calls "classic" style, straightforward, clear, deceptively simple-looking, offered as an "an antidote for acadamese, bureaucratese. . .and other kinds of stuffy prose." In other chapters, as well as sentence structure -- "grammar" in the linguist's sense -- he dissects and elucidates larger units such as paragraphs and clusters of paragraphs, revealing what features give a piece of writing the all-important quality of "coherence."

To me, the most vital chapter may be the third, "The Curse of Knowledge." The "curse" consists of assuming (often unconsciously) that prospective readers know the fundamentals of our topic as well as we do. They don't share the background of the speciality we've studied for years. They aren't familiar with the technical language of our field. Or, to put it the way I often feel when trying to understand instruction manuals, the writer doesn't start far back enough. Pinker summarizes this problem as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know." As he says, "it's often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most" from this form of ignorance. That's why, incidentally, a person with a breathtakingly high level of expertise in a subject won't necessarily be good at teaching it. The chapter goes on to explore different forms this phenomenon takes and strategies for combatting it. For authors wanting to communicate more effectively with audiences, this chapter may be worth the price of the whole book.

Chapter Six, "Telling Right from Wrong," deals with the topics covered by standard style manuals, such as punctuation, subject-verb agreement, correct word choice, etc. Pinker, however, explains his rationale for accepting, rejecting, or modifying each "rule," often in considerable detail. He explains which pronouncements in traditional grammar texts make a certain amount of sense and which have irrelevant origins such as wrong-headed attempts to make English conform to Latin sentence structure. Along many other knotty issues, he analyzes the proper uses of who/whom. In discussing the problem of our language's lack of a neuter third-person singular pronoun for human beings, he defends the current popularity of "they." In his educated opinion, some rules insisted on by purists remain useful, while others are outmoded or never-valid shibboleths fit to be ignored. He also distinguishes among usages acceptable in conversation or informal writing, those preferred for formal writing, and those that are simply wrong. I don't agree with all his decisions. In my opinion, he's too lax on the less-fewer, among-between, and comprise-compose distinctions, among others, not to mention the sloppiness of "more unique." Still, he always offers a strong defense of his position.

As usual, Pinker's own style is lucid, readable, and often entertaining. It's a pleasure to read him on almost any subject. On practically every page we encounter witty remarks that invite rereading, chuckling over, and savoring. He enlivens his books with numerous cartoons, "Calvin and Hobbes" being one of his favorite go-to examples. On the other hand, for me (YMMV) the visual aids intended to make explanations more understandable more often than not seem confusing. I find traditional sentence diagrams like those in my high-school textbooks easier to follow than his sentence trees. But maybe that's just a set-in-my-ways Boomer attitude. At the conclusion, he refreshingly reminds us that civilization won't collapse from changes in language, regardless of how some of them may grate on us. I need to remember that the world as we know it won't end even if everybody adopts the abominable use of "literally" as a meaningless all-purpose intensifier.

Margaret L. Carter

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