Vladimir Nabokov, who knew a thing or two about the subject, once wrote, “Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author’s personality.” I happened to run across this line while in the midst of reading The Sense of Style. Nabokov, I thought, had summed up the major part of what was missing from this otherwise laudable book.
Not that its author is lacking in personality. Steven Pinker has plenty, and a cheerful kind of intelligence, even about difficult questions, that wears well. His politics and associations are openly conceded as he quotes genuinely impressive passages from his favorite writers: first, the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins; next, Pinker’s own wife, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein; then, the physicist Brian Greene; later, Goldstein again. In another chapter, Pinker, who has written a book arguing that violence has been on a great downward swing in human history, finds many faults in a difficult passage in A History of Warfare by John Keegan.
If all this sounds a little too secular-humanist-triumphalist for you, at least consider another source from Pinker’s literary honor roll, one even more fundamental to his argument here: a great but not-very-well-known book called Clear and Simple as the Truth by the American scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner. For the nonfiction writer who thinks seriously about his craft and finds the competing lists of do’s and don’ts in most guides to be inadequate, Clear and Simple is an excellent alternative, a book that can actually deepen your awareness of the basic assumptions behind any style of writing. It is not, however, a general guide to writing: Thomas and Turner are primarily concerned with “classic style,” the strikingly confident prose style developed by such French writers as Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, and Madame de Sévigné. Their book identifies its key premises, and elaborates further by a close examination of classic style in English, from the Declaration of Independence to the reportage of A. J. Liebling.
Pinker, to his credit, aims to popularize the key ideas of classic style, which he says can be applied as an antidote to academese, bureaucratese, and other subspecies of language marred by the distracting tendency to encode even ordinary phenomena in the language of the specialist. What is so unclassic about the prose of the postmodern academic, for example, is that such language revels in its own obscurity. It is aimed at fellow initiates in a belief system founded on suspicion.
Classic style, by contrast, is stylistically and philosophically optimistic. It takes as a given that truth exists and that we are all competent to recognize it. Classic prose—invariably described in visual metaphors, emphasizing presentation—is a window to truth. It becomes the writer’s job simply to direct the reader’s gaze in the appropriate direction, never dirtying the window-panes with distracting meta-commentary that belabors the writer’s own effort. Without footnotes, unnecessary hedging, or jargon, the classic writer says: Look, here it is.
Pinker transforms this into practical writing tips, such as: Keep the signposting—writing about what you’re going to write before you write about it—to a minimum. Another is to imagine your writing as a conversation—not that it should seem talky or especially casual, but rather modeled on an ideal of one-to-one directness. Pinker gives an apt side-by-side of two sentences. The unclassic sentence: “There is a significant positive correlation between measures of food intake and body mass index.” The rewrite: “The more you eat, the fatter you get.” One sounds like a book, the other like a human being with a point to make.
Where Pinker breaks ranks with most enemies of tendentious writing is on the question of motive. He cites Hanlon’s razor—“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”—and turns to cognitive science for explanations of why we are so bad at presenting our hard-earned knowledge to others. A major reason, he says, is that once we learn something, it is very hard for us to know what it is like not to know it. This “curse of knowledge” leads us to under-explain and rely on abbreviation, shorthand, and jargon, as we assume our readers know much more than they actually do.
A related problem, Pinker says, is that writers fail to notice that the manner in which they think about a subject is far from the best way to present it. Our minds do things to our knowledge that, as writers, we need to undo. The more familiar we become with an idea or piece of information, for example, the more abstract it becomes in our thinking. Another of our handicaps is the way our memory works, “chunking” pieces of related information into packages our brains can handle more easily. All this creates a dilemma for the writer. The shorthand, jargon, and abstraction that ruin prose are, apparently, integral to the way our brains work, but such compression and complexity are antithetical to how we read and learn. Fascinating as this analysis is, the solutions Pinker recommends are well-known: Read your prose aloud, show drafts to other people.
Next, Pinker discusses sentence structure, to which he applies a method of diagramming somewhat like what used to be taught in schools. Many linguists would sooner tell a butterfly how to be beautiful than tell a native speaker how to use his language. That Pinker has written an advice book is remarkable by itself; that he has taken up sentence diagramming places him in a tradition of grammar education that linguists have tried to discredit. But if a pictorial explanation works to make the relevant concepts and relationships clear, why not?
Pinker’s diagrams do help to show how some sentence structures place too heavy a burden on the reader’s memory and concentration; but after deciphering the diagrams, one starts to wonder if the diagnosis isn’t more involved than the cure. Consider this convoluted sentence from Bob Dole, which Pinker quotes.
Pinker rightly says that the first problem here is that the reader has to process all these self-embedding phrases before being able to link the initial subject noun with a verb: “The view . . . is not based . . .” Making matters worse, this statement gets qualified by a hard-to-digest double negative (“not based on a lack of”), plus an irritating cliché: “on the ground.”
“Only with a tree diagram can you figure it out,” writes Pinker.
Or you could just rewrite it. Let’s start with “A third-rate Serbian military . . . for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians.” The time element should probably precede the noun phrase (“for the third time in a decade, a third-rate . . .”), and I wonder if the two numbers are adding to the mental load; either way, that’s enough information for one sentence. Okay, now the so-called view: “Some say beating them is hardly worth the effort.” Turn completed, let’s see if we can make it around the block: “This view . . . is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.” Try reversing the charges from two negatives to a positive to see if that helps: “This view is supported by what’s occurring on the ground.” Or “the facts on the ground actually support this view.”
There is still a lot more work to be done here, but we have replaced one unreadable sentence with three readable ones. This is not neuroscience, or even cognitive science; it’s copyediting.
The last third of The Sense of Style packs in a smattering of grammar, punctuation, and usage issues that help us see that being a linguist does not inoculate you from developing pet peeves. College professors who have to read student papers may be especially prone. A good portion of this material seems glib compared with the rest of the book: I didn’t know that any controversy was attached to the use of “livid” to mean “angry,” and I still didn’t know much after Pinker’s only comment on the matter (“Look it up”).
So now do we have style? Not necessarily. One may adopt the principles of classic style, strive valiantly against the curse of knowledge, avoid common errors—and still not write with any distinction. Something additional, and far more precious, is needed to achieve a style that goes beyond mere competence: an overlay of personality, intelligence, fun, imagination, verbal dexterity, the taking of positions that are somehow unique and striking, a sense of intellectual drama, some or all of this, and a great deal of effort. It’s not surprising that few of us even try—what with jobs to show up for and loved ones to see.
David Skinner is the author of The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published.
