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

by Steven Pinker

Coherence connectives are the unsung heroes of lucid prose. They aren’t terribly frequent—most of them occur just a handful of times every 100,000 words—but they are the cement of reasoning and one of the most difficult yet most important tools of writing to master.

Logically speaking, a sentence with a naysaying word like not, no, neither, nor, or never is just the mirror image of an affirmative sentence.

But psychologically speaking, a negative statement and an affirmative statement are fundamentally different.17

For us to conclude that something is not the case, we must take the extra cognitive step of pinning the mental tag “false” on a proposition.

Any statement that is untagged is treated as if it is true.

Every negation requires mental homework, and when a sentence contains many of them the reader can be overwhelmed.

Not all negation words begin with n; many have the concept of negation tucked inside them, such as few, little, least, seldom, though, rarely, instead, doubt, deny, refute, avoid, and ignore.21

The answer is that negation is easy to understand when the proposition being negated is plausible or tempting.23

When an author has to negate something that a reader doesn’t already believe, she has to set it up as a plausible belief on his mental stage before she knocks it down.

“All doors will not open.” I momentarily panic, thinking that we’re trapped. Of course what he means is that not all doors will open.

It’s common in colloquial English for a logical word like all, not, or only to cling to the left of the verb even when its scope encompasses a different phrase.25

(No one on the train but me seemed in any way alarmed.)

Curse of linguist's knowledge

When a negative element has wide scope (that is, when it applies to the whole clause), it is not literally ambiguous, but it can be maddeningly vague.

I didn’t see a man in a gray flannel suit.

I didn’t see him; Amy did. I didn’t see him; you just thought I did. I didn’t see him; I was looking away. I didn’t see him; I saw a different man. I didn’t see a man in a gray suit; it was a woman. I didn’t see a man in a gray flannel suit; it was brown. I didn’t see a man in a gray flannel suit; it was polyester. I didn’t see a man in a gray flannel suit; he was wearing a kilt.

In conversation, we can stress the phrase we wish to deny, and in writing we can use ita...

I’ll use to illustrate, by its absence, another principle of coherence—a sense of proportion:

But if there are enough of them to merit an extended discussion, they deserve a section of their own, whose stated point is to examine the contrary position.

The passage will help us appreciate a third principle of text-wide coherence:

Joseph Williams refers to the principle as consistent thematic strings, thematic consistency for short.30

A writer, after laying out her topic, will introduce a large number of concepts which explain, enrich, or comment on that topic.

But it’s better when the common threads are made explicit, because in the vast private web of a writer’s imagination, anything can be similar to anything else.

A coherent text is a designed object:

an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connectors that tie one proposition to the next.

Like other designed objects, it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details, and maintain...

But the writers I have in mind are the purists—also known as sticklers, pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots, nitpickers, traditionalists, language police, usage nannies, grammar Nazis, and the Gotcha! Gang.

Prescriptivists uphold standards of excellence and a respect for the best of our civilization, and are a bulwark against relativism, vulgar populism, and the dumbing down of literate culture.

Language is an organic product of human creativity, say the Descriptivists, and people should be allowed to write however they please.

The key is to recognize that the rules of usage are tacit conventions. A convention is an agreement among the members of a community to abide by a single way of doing things.

No, they are just frozen historical accidents:

the “correct” forms are those that happened to be used in the dialect spoken in the region around London when written English first became standardized several centuries ago.

Guides to English grammar were written as pedagogical steppingstones to mastery of Latin grammar,

and they tried to shoehorn English constructions into the categories designed for Latin.

decimate

can only mean “killing one in ten” (since it originally described the execution of every tenth soldier in a mutinous Roman legion).

Many words convey subtle shades of meaning, provide glimpses into the history of the language, conform to elegant principles of assembly, or enliven prose with distinctive imagery, sound, and rhythm.

Theodore Bernstein, The Careful Writer:

Joseph Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

Roy Copperud, American Usage and Style: The Consensus:

GRAMMAR

adjectives and adverbs.

The first subtlety is a fact about adverbs: many of them (the ones called flat adverbs) are identical to their related adjectives.

The second subtlety is a fact about adjectives: they don’t just modify nouns, but can appear as complements to verbs,

and, because, but, or, so, also.

Many children are taught that it is ungrammatical to begin a sentence with a conjunction (what I have been calling a coordinator).

between you and I.

But the conviction that between you and I is an error needs a second look, together with the explanation that the phrase is a hypercorrection.

Not only does the grammatical number of a coordination systematically differ from the number of the nouns inside it, but sometimes the number and person of a coordination cannot be determined from the tree at all.

Either the twins or Elissa is sure to be there. Either the twins or Elissa are sure to be there.

Either your father or I am going to have to come with you. Either your father or I is going to have to come with you.