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

by Steven Pinker

Classic style minimizes abstractions, which cannot be seen with the naked eye.

I have serious doubts that trying to amend the Constitution would work on an actual level. On the aspirational level, however, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable.

I doubt that trying to amend the Constitution would actually succeed, but it may be valuable to aspire to it.

What about an approach, an assumption, a concept, a condition, a context, a framework, an issue, a model, a process, a range, a role, a strategy, a tendency, or a variable?

These are metaconcepts: concepts about concepts.

Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria.

We excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.

As this cartoon by Tom Toles suggests, zombie nouns and adjectives are one of the signatures of academese:

That’s why guidelines on how to avoid legalese and other turbid professional styles call for using first- and second-person pronouns, inverting passives into actives, and letting verbs be verbs rather than zombie nouns.

Nominalizations, as we will see in chapter 5, can be useful in connecting a sentence to those that came before, keeping the passage coherent.

the passive allows the writer to direct the reader’s gaze, like a cinematographer choosing the best camera angle.

Often a writer needs to steer the reader’s attention away from the agent of an action. The passive allows him to do so because the agent can be left unmentioned, which is impossible in the active voice.

metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives.

In Stylish Academic Writing (no, it is not one of the world’s thinnest books), Helen Sword

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.2

Curse of Knowledge:

a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.

The ubiquitous experience shown in this New Yorker cartoon is a familiar example:

That's why I always showed next part of the direction.

I’m sure it was perfectly clear to the engineers who designed it.

There’s one that everyone is at least vaguely aware of: the use of jargon, abbreviations, and technical vocabulary.

Every human pastime—music, cooking, sports, art, theoretical physics—develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to say or type a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in each other’s company.

Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion,

Mnemonists, the performers who amaze us by regurgitating superhuman amounts of information, have spent a lot of time building up a huge inventory of chunks in their long-term memories.

An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

a man who walks into a Catskills resort for the first time

Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images,

There is a significant positive correlation between measures of food intake and body mass index. Body mass index is an increasing function of food intake. Food intake predicts body mass index according to a monotonically increasing relation.

The more you eat, the fatter you get.

To escape the curse of knowledge, we have to go beyond our own powers of divination.

We have to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to our intended audience and find out whether they can follow it.26

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.

It should be thought of instead as one of the extraordinary adaptations in the living world: our species’ solution to the problem of getting complicated thoughts from one head into another.

The three nouns in the chapter title refer to the three things that grammar brings together:

the web of ideas in our head,

the string of words that comes out of our mo...

and the tree of syntax that converts the first ...

cognitive scientists modeled human memory as a network of nodes. Each node represents a concept, and each is linked to other nodes for words, images, and other concepts.2

The code that translates a web of conceptual relations in our heads into an early-to-late order in our mouths, or into a left-to-right order on the page, is called syntax.3

Syntax, then, is an app that uses a tree of phrases to translate a web of thoughts into a string of words.

Upon hearing or reading the string of words, the perceiver can work backwards, fitting them into a tree and recovering the links between the associated concepts.

The reason that the task is so challenging is that the main resource that English syntax makes available to writers—left-to-right ordering on a page—has to do two things at once.

It’s the code that the language uses to convey who did what to whom.

But it also determines the sequence of early-to-late processing i...

Trees are what give language its power to communicate the links between ideas rather than just dumping the ideas in the reader’s lap.

But the “subject” and “verb” that have to agree are defined by branches in the tree, not words in the string:

The bridge to the islands is crowded, not The bridge to the islands are crowded.

The movement rule then brings it to the front of the sentence, leaving a gap (the underscored blank) in the surface structure.

When we’re reading and we come across a filler (like who or the woman), we have to hold it in memory while we handle all the material that subsequently pours in, until we locate the gap that it is meant to fill.10

Agreement is one of several ways in which one branch of a tree can be demanding about what goes into another branch.