This time I review an unusual style guide, but to fully
understand it, you should know about -- and I hope look at -- four other books, which I discuss briefly in
notes at the end.
The Sense of Style:
the Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker
(Viking, NY, 2014, 368pp, ISBN 978-0-670-02585-5, www.penguin.com,
$27.95)
Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and --
as the dust jacket of his book announces -- public intellectual. He is the
author of many well known books, and he chairs the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. With these
credentials in hand, he sets out to solve one of the most vexing problems of
our day: bad writing. Not just any old bad writing, but bad writing by smart,
well educated people with significant things to say.
Pinker loves reading and writing English. He reads style
guides and plays with words. The title of his book is a play on two senses of
the word "sense." He wants to help you develop an intuition for how
to write well, but he also wants to explain how stylistic choices arise from
underlying principles of cognitive psychology and an understanding of English
grammar. By "grammar" he does not mean the hodge-podge of rules,
shibboleths, and hobgoblins formerly taught in schools and still perpetuated by
most traditional style guides. He means the research-based discoveries and
formulations of Huddleston & Pullum's Cambridge
Grammar, which substantially revises the vocabulary of English grammar. If
you do not want to invest $250 and many hours of your time to read a 1200-page
grammar book, turn to the glossary of Pinker's book for a summary of the
grammatical categories and functions that underlie the Cambridge system.
Reading that glossary before reading the main text helped me understand
Pinker’s arguments more quickly as I went along.
Bad writing and how to fix it
So how does Pinker hope to stanch the torrent of bad
writing? If you want the punch line
without Pinker's significant contributions, start by reading Thomas &
Turner's Clear and Simple as the Truth.
The authors describe the classic style, in which the writer knows the truth
about some subject and presents it to the reader without bias, as if in a
conversation between equals. The reader may not previously have noticed this
truth, but immediately recognizes it. The presentation is like a clear,
undistorting window. The writer shows but never tries explicitly to persuade.
Pinker says that classic style is the strongest cure he knows of for "the
disease that enfeebles academic, bureaucratic, corporate, legal, and official
prose."
A great virtue of the classic style is that it describes
its subjects with fresh wording and concrete images. Pinker quotes a few
paragraphs from a book by physicist Brian Greene to show that the style can be
a perfect vehicle for explaining highly complex and abstract topics. Greene
makes the abstractions concrete without oversimplifying them.
Incidentally, classic style is close to the style that
technical writers aspire to, as exemplified in Jean-luc Doumont's Trees, Maps, and Theorems. But the styles differ in that technical
writers and readers are not engaged in conversations between equals. Readers
seek specific information, and technical writers, as experts, provide it. They
often use standard, predictable structures to enable readers to find
information quickly, while classic style does not dictate specific formats.
Also, most technical writers are taught to avoid passive voice, but the classic
style freely uses the passive when it improves clarity.
So what is the disease for which classic style is the
cure? Pinker calls it the curse of knowledge, a term he borrows from economics.
All writing guides tell you to “consider your audience,” but audiences are made
of different people with different levels of knowledge. The set of things we
can safely assume they know is far smaller than most writers think. As Pinker
puts it, "The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of
imagining what it's like for someone else not to know something that you
know." There are other causes, of
course, but Pinker argues that the best known suspects (per Calvin and Hobbes) – “to inflate weak
ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity” – are minor contributors, as are stodgy
academic style guides.
The curse of knowledge puts specific pitfalls in a
writer's path: jargon and abbreviations, chunking, and functional fixity. Every
field has its own vocabulary, but replacing jargon with a plain term can often
improve the clarity of your prose without making you seem less credible to your
peers. Some acronyms and abbreviations can be replaced with their fully spelled
out forms -- wasting a little space but helping many readers grasp the material
more quickly. Your peers know less than you think they do, and even those who
have seen a technical term or abbreviation may not recognize it instantly.
Chunking is gathering simpler concepts into more abstract
ones with their own names and properties (for example, the Federal Reserve Bank
buys risky mortgages to make bankers’ lives easier, and we refer to that action
as "quantitative easing"). Chunking is essential to thinking clearly
about complex subjects, but it often leads you to substitute nouns for verbs,
thus making prose harder to understand. And if you mention a chunk that a
reader doesn't recognize, that reader may be unnecessarily derailed.
Functional fixity is focusing on how you use something,
rather than seeing it as the kind of tangible object that classic style calls
for. Pinker gives the example of a researcher who showed people sentences
followed by the words TRUE or FALSE. In the paper that described this research,
the researcher called that action "the subsequent presentation of an
assessment word." But research shows that people remember facts presented
in concrete terms better than they do the same facts presented abstractly.
Pinker suggests, for example, changing a functional phrase like
"participants were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic
isolation" to a concrete phrase like "we tested the students in a
quiet room."
One easy antidote to the curse of knowledge is to ask
someone else to read what you've written (or, as you should not put it, conduct
informal usability studies on your composed output). You don’t have to accept
every suggestion -- your friends have blind spots and hobbyhorses too -- but
you may be surprised at how hard your prose is for them to understand.
As you strive to overcome the curse of knowledge, your
next challenge is to put together comprehensible text. A style of syntax
diagramming created in the 1870s was taught in American schools recently enough
that many people still remember it and bemoan its loss. Pinker, however,
celebrates its loss, because it is unintuitive, ambiguous, and based on an
outmoded view of grammar. The Cambridge
Grammar syntax diagrams, which Pinker uses, are based on psycholinguistic
studies of how people process language. They are the first of the trees Pinker
uses to map the words and concepts in our heads into text understandable by
others. The syntax trees show how to map the interconnected words in our minds
into syntactically correct English sentences. They give Pinker a way to show
graphically why some sentences are incorrect or hard to understand and to
explain how to correct those problems. They also help him illustrate how poorly
some writers of style guides understand English grammar.
One problem made evident by considering syntax diagrams
is what Pinker calls garden paths. Here, the same sequence of words might
result from two different diagrams. For example, “fat people eat accumulates”
has two readings, one of which can be eliminated by inserting the word “that”
before “people.” Pinker advocates inserting such “needless words” into
sentences to make them clearer. He also advocates reordering techniques to
support what he calls monumental principles of composition:
* Save the heaviest or
most difficult information for last.
*
Introduce the topic before commenting on it.
*
If the sentence contains both old and new information, put the old information
first.
Chief among these reordering techniques is the passive
voice. Pinker recognizes the problems that have given passive voice a bad name,
but he also provides examples in which the passive-voice version is clearer and
more graceful than active-voice alternatives.
The second kind of
tree describes a document and helps us organize our thoughts into coherent
arguments. A weak understanding of modern English grammar may give rise to lots
of nonsensical stylistic advice, but a bigger cause of bad writing is fuzzy
thinking. The document-level trees are outlines of coherent themes, deductions,
and generalizations. Even if you don’t commit either kind of tree to paper,
keeping them in mind can help you construct texts that readers can easily
understand and follow. Incidentally, these trees are essentially the ones
Doumont talks about in Trees, Maps, and
Theorems.
Document-level trees
help solve a problem that Pinker describes as follows: “Even if every sentence
in a text is crisp, lucid, and well formed, a succession of them can feel
choppy, disjointed, unfocused – in a word, incoherent.” An outline, which
Pinker calls a tree lying on its side, shows the hierarchical structure of your
ideas, but while English grammar limits word order in sentences, no syntax
rules control the order of ideas in a document. Nor must all documents be
hierarchical. Sometimes you want to develop several themes in parallel, and
even if you have only one theme, the sentences you produce are related to the
sentences around them in various ways. You have a complex network of ideas in
your head, and you hope that by writing sentences you enable readers to
integrate parts of that network into their own mental networks. Pinker uses the
term “arcs of coherence” to describe the parts of a document that don’t follow
the tree structure but, as he puts it, drape themselves from the limbs of one
tree branch to the limbs of another.
To help explain how
to construct coherent texts, Pinker focuses on the idea of a topic. The point
of a sequence of ideas is the topic. If readers don’t know the topic of the sentence they are
reading, they are no longer on the same page as the writer. Pinker picks apart
an incoherent introduction to a highly regarded book to make this point with
excruciating clarity.
Pinker refers to
Joseph Williams' Style: Toward clarity
and grace as a source of practical advice on how to manage the complexity
of multiple themes running through a document. One important technique is to
call the same thing by the same name. Another is to explain how each theme
relates to the topic, so readers understand why you’re talking about it. For
example, if you think Jamaica is like Cuba because it is a Caribbean island and
that China is like Cuba because it has a communist government, you can’t just
write “countries like Jamaica and China” without saying that you’re lumping
them together because each shares a characteristic with Cuba.
The style guide
The final third of
Pinker’s book is devoted to the topics that arise in traditional style guides:
rules of correct grammar, word choice, and punctuation. It gives Pinker a
chance to express some of his own pet peeves and to add a little prescriptivist
seasoning to the descriptivist underpinnings of the book. This section is not
meant to replace the Chicago Manual of
Style, but rather to provide data and principles to help you make choices.
Pinker ridicules the
supposed war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, in which the
prescriptivists fight to stave off the obvious decline of our language, while
the descriptivists accelerate the decline by endorsing abominations like ain’t, brang, and can’t get no.
According to Pinker, the purpose of prescriptive rules is not to tell people
how to speak or write but to codify the tacit conventions of a specialized form
of the language, namely, standard written English. While explaining the
importance of prescriptive rules, he rejects the idea that “every pet peeve,
bit of grammatical folklore, or dimly remembered lesson from Miss
Thistlebottom’s classroom is worth keeping.” He calls these bubbe meises, Yiddish for grandmother tales, and he cites
their principal sources:
* English should be like Latin
* Greek and Latin must not mix
* Backformations are bad
* Meanings can’t change (the etymological
fallacy)
* English must be logical
I don’t have room to
go into his debunking of these “rules.” Read the book for that.
Pinker provides “a
judicious guide to a hundred of the most common issues . . . in style guides,
pet peeve lists, . . ..” He groups the
issues into grammar, expressions of quantity and quality, word choice, and punctuation,
and he brings his expertise to bear on them.
For example, he talks about problems that arise from the fact that
coordination is headless in the syntax tree. Thus Bill Clinton said “Give Al
Gore and I a chance to bring America back,” and few people registered it as
unusual; if he had said “Give I and Al Gore a chance,” everyone would have been
startled. I found all 100 issue
discussions fascinating, and I hope you’ll get the book and read them.
This book is not a
traditional style guide. You can’t go to it for definitive rules or cite it to
defend your stylistic choices. But it does provide a framework and basis for
thinking about stylistic issues. It gave me a lot to think about, and if you
want to write English prose, it will probably give you plenty to think about
too. I recommend it.
Books referred to
[Doumont] Trees,
Maps, and Theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc
Doumont (Principiae, 2009) I reviewed
this book in the Sep/Oct 2011 Micro Review. It is still the book to read if you
can only read one book about technical communication. Doumont focuses on how to
organize and present technical information. He has almost nothing to say about
grammar or word choices.
[Huddleston & Pullum] The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston
and Geoffrey Pullum (Cambridge, 2002). The authors describe it as "a
synchronic, descriptive grammar of general-purpose, present-day, international
Standard English." This would be a good example of the curse of knowledge,
but the authors mercifully explain all of those terms.
[Thomas & Turner] Clear
and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Francis-Noël Thomas and
Mark Turner (Princeton, 1994). Thomas and Turner describe the classic style in
terms of the choices it makes about certain basic elements -- like the
relationship between reader and writer and whether truth can be known. They
provide many examples of classic style and contrast it with styles that differ
from it in varying degrees.
[Williams] Style:
Toward clarity and grace by Joseph Williams (Chicago, 1990). The author's
stated goals are to help writers move from a first draft to a version crafted
for readers, diagnose the causes of bad writing and overcome them, and handle
complexity. Williams began the work as a textbook and was approached by the
University of Chicago Press to make it available to a wider audience. While
most popular guides are aimed at beginners, Williams addresses the issues that seasoned
writers must master to move to the next level.
This article appears in slightly different form in the May/Jun 2015 issue of IEEE Micro © 2015 IEEE.
