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

by Steven Pinker

One of the commonest forms of tree-blindness consists of a failure to look carefully at each branch of a coordination.

A similar suspension of disbelief will be necessary for you to master another case of tricky case, the difference between who and whom.

Once a writer has ensured that the parts of a sentence fit together in a tree, the next worry is whether the reader can recover that tree, which she needs to do to make sense of the sentence.

So every time a writer adds a word to a sentence, he is imposing not one but two cognitive demands on the reader: understanding the word, and fitting it into the tree. This double demand is a major justification for the prime directive “Omit needless words.”

Here are a few other morbidly obese phrases, together with leaner alternatives that often mean the same thing:16

is capable of being can be

in the event that if

on a daily basis daily

for the purpose of to

in the matter of about

It is widely observed that X X

Light verbs such as make, do, have, bring, put, and take often do nothing but create a slot for a zombie noun, as in make an appearance and put on a performance.

Why not just use the verb that spawned the zombie in the first place, like appear or perform?

The advice to omit needless words should not be confused with the puritanical edict that all writers must pare every sentence down to the shortest, leanest, most abstemious version possible.

That’s because the difficulty of a sentence depends not just on its word count but on its geometry.

Even when the sentence structure gets more complicated, a reader can handle the tree, because its geometry is mostly right-branching.

“When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles, they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle.”

The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily recovered by a reader.

Punctuation. A second obvious way to avoid garden paths is to punctuate a sentence properly.

Two of my favorites are MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS PET FISH and RACHAEL RAY FINDS INSPIRATION IN COOKING HER FAMILY AND HER DOG.

The definite article can be omitted before many nouns, but the result can feel claustrophobic, as if noun phrases keep bumping into you without warning:

Structural parallelism. A bare syntactic tree, minus the words at the tips of its branches, lingers in memory for a few seconds after the words are gone, and during that time it is available as a template for the reader to use in parsing the next phrase.31

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. . . . I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

That’s because of the effect of statistically frequent word sequences: the pair sex with attracts the phrase on the right; the pair on drugs attracts the phrase on the left.

English, which has a rudimentary system of case and agreement, must be more tyrannical about order.

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on your mind.

Once again, it’s good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge.

They don’t like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.

English syntax demands subject before object. Human memory demands light before heavy. Human comprehension demands topic before comment and given before new.

That’s why well-written prose puts object relative clauses in the passive voice, and difficult prose keeps them in the active voice, like this:

Here are a few others that are handy when the need arises to separate illicit neighbors, to place old information before new, to put fillers close to their gaps, or to save the heaviest for last:35

the writer’s goal is to encode a web of ideas into a string of words using a tree of phrases.

it’s always best to lay an intuitive trail through the territory: a scheme for stringing the units into a natural order that allows readers to anticipate what they will encounter next.

Paragraph breaks generally coincide with the divisions between branches in the discourse tree, that is, cohesive chunks of text.

These connections, which drape themselves from the limbs of one tree to the limbs of another, violate the neatly nested, branch-within-branch geometry of a tree.2 I’ll call them arcs of coherence.

The moral for a writer is obvious: a reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it.

Some genres, such as the scholarly journal article, force an author to lay out her point in a summary, an abstract, or a synopsis.

But wording should be varied when an entity is referred to multiple times in quick succession and repeating the name would sound monotonous or would misleadingly suggest that a new actor had entered the scene.

Examples, explanations, violated expectations, elaborations, sequences, causes, and effects are arcs of coherence that pinpoint how one statement follows from another.

David Hume, in his 1748 book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, wrote, “There appear to be only three principles of connections among ideas, namely Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect.”10

In a resemblance relation, a statement makes a claim that overlaps in content with the one that came before it. The most obvious two are similarity and contrast:

In elaboration, a single event is first described in a generic way and then in specific detail.

There’s exemplification (a generalization, followed by one or more examples) and generalization (one or more examples, followed by a generalization). And there’s the opposite, exception, which can be introduced either generalization first or exception first.

The second of Hume’s family of relations is contiguity: a before-and-after sequence, usually with some connection between the two events.

All things being equal, it’s good for a writer to work with the ongoing newsreel in readers’ minds and describe events in chronological order:

And this brings us to Hume’s third category of connections, cause and effect.

One other major coherence relation doesn’t easily fit into Hume’s trichotomy, attribution: so-and-so believes such-and-such.

Attribution is typically indicated by connectives like according to and stated that. It’s important to get it right. In many written passages it’s unclear whether the author is arguing for a position or is explaining a position that someone else is arguing for.

Several propositions may be interconnected by a set of coherence relations, and the resulting chunk is in turn connected to others.

Even more challenging, the optimal number of connectives depends on the expertise of the reader.14