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

by Steven Pinker

Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers,

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché (“Since the dawn of time”), not with a banality (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of . . .”), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.

This is a zeugma: the intentional juxtaposition of different senses of a single word.

A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts.

The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound.10 It’s no coincidence that haunting means “haunting” and tart means “tart,”

The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.

The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.

The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth.

The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view.

A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation.

The metaphor of conversation implies that the reader is cooperative. The writer can count on her to read between the lines, catch his drift, and connect the dots, without his having to spell out every step in his train of thought.

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese

Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.

They recognize that it’s hard to know the truth, that the world doesn’t just reveal itself to us, that we understand the world through our theories and constructs, which are not pictures but abstract propositions, and that our ways of understanding the world must constantly be scrutinized for hidden biases. It’s just that good writers don’t flaunt this anxiety in every passage they write; they artfully conceal it for clarity’s sake.

Clumsy writers do a lot of that, too. They unthinkingly follow the advice to say what you’re going to say, say it, and then say what you’ve said. The advice comes from classical rhetoric, and it makes sense for long orations: if a listener’s mind momentarily wanders, the passage she has missed is gone forever. It’s not as necessary in writing, where a reader can backtrack and look up what she’s missed. And it can be intrusive in classic style, which simulates a conversation.

One way to introduce a topic without metadiscourse is to open with a question: This chapter discusses the factors that cause names to rise and fall in popularity. What makes a name rise and fall in popularity?

Paradoxically, intensifiers like very, highly, and extremely also work like hedges. They not only fuzz up a writer’s prose but can undermine his intent. If I’m wondering who pilfered the petty cash, it’s more reassuring to hear Not Jones; he’s an honest man than Not Jones; he’s a very honest man. The reason is that unmodified adjectives and nouns tend to be interpreted categorically: honest means “completely honest,” or at least “completely honest in the way that matters here” (just as Jack drank the bottle of beer implies that he chugged down all of it, not just a sip or two). As soon as you add an intensifier, you’re turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scale. True, you’re trying to place your subject high on the scale—say, an 8.7 out of 10—but it would have been better if the reader were not considering his relative degree of honesty in the first place.

Classic style minimizes abstractions, which cannot be seen with the naked eye. This doesn’t mean that it avoids abstract subject matter (remember Brian Greene’s explanation of the multiverse), only that it shows the events making up that subject matter transparently, by narrating an unfolding plot with real characters doing things, rather than by naming an abstract concept that encapsulates those events in a single word.

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. You can say Pooh ate the honey (active voice, actor mentioned), The honey was eaten by Pooh (passive voice, actor mentioned), or The honey was eaten (passive voice, actor unmentioned)—but not Ate the honey (active voice, actor unmentioned).

In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don’ts. But it’s better to keep in mind the guiding metaphor of classic style: a writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader’s gaze to something in the world. Each of the don’ts corresponds to a way in which a writer can stray from this scenario.

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

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

Hey, I’m talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think they do, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don’t, you are guaranteed to confuse them.

Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.”

as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of. This transition, another staple of the cognitive psychology curriculum, is called functional fixity (sometimes functional fixedness).24 In the textbook experiment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. The solution is to dump the thumbtacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, and stick the candle onto the box. Most people never figure this out because they think of the box as a container for the tacks rather than a physical object in its own right, with handy features like a flat surface and perpendicular sides. The blind spot is called functional fixity because people get fixated on an object’s function and forget its physical makeup.

The curse of knowledge, in combination with chunking and functional fixity, helps make sense of the paradox that classic style is difficult to master. What could be so hard about pretending to open your eyes and hold up your end of a conversation? The reason it’s harder than it sounds is that if you are enough of an expert in a topic to have something to say about it, you have probably come to think about it in abstract chunks and functional labels that are now second nature to you but still unfamiliar to your readers—and you are the last one to realize it.

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 This sounds banal but is in fact profound.

We also find that the nouns play and mother are preceded by the words Sophocles’ and his, which have the function “determiner.” A determiner answers the question “Which one?” or “How many?” Here the determiner role is filled by what is traditionally called a possessive noun (though it is really a noun marked for genitive case, as I will explain). Other common determiners include articles, as in the cat and this boy; quantifiers, as in some nights and all people; and numbers, as in sixteen tons.

In chapter 3 I mentioned two ways to improve your prose—showing a draft to someone else, and revisiting it after some time has passed—and both can allow you to catch labyrinthine syntax before inflicting it on your readers. There’s a third time-honored trick: read the sentence aloud.

Another way to prevent garden paths is to give some respect to the apparently needless little words which don’t contribute much to the meaning of a sentence and are in danger of ending up on the cutting-room floor, but which can earn their keep by marking the beginnings of phrases. Foremost among them are the subordinator that and relative pronouns like which and who, which can signal the beginning of a relative clause.

This feeling that a definite noun phrase without the does not properly announce itself may underlie the advice of many writers and editors to avoid the journalese construction on the left below (sometimes called the false title) and introduce the noun phrase with a dignified the, even if it is semantically unnecessary:

Save the heaviest for last.

Topic, then comment. Given, then new.

This highlights yet another payoff of the passive voice: it can unburden memory by shortening the interval between a filler and a gap. When an item is modified by a relative clause, and its role inside the clause is the object of the verb, the reader is faced with a long span between the filler and the gap.

So many things can go wrong in a passage of prose. The writing can be bloated, self-conscious, academic; these are habits that classic style, which treats prose as a window onto the world, is designed to break. The passage can be cryptic, abstruse, arcane; these are symptoms of the curse of knowledge. The syntax can be defective, convoluted, ambiguous; these are flaws that can be prevented by an awareness of the treelike nature of a sentence.

a writer has to have both something to talk about (the topic) and something to say (the point).

The problem here is a lack of balance, of proportionality. An important principle in composition is that the amount of verbiage one devotes to a point should not be too far out of line with how central it is to the argument. If a writer believes that 90 percent of the evidence and argument supports a position, then something like 90 percent of the discussion should be devoted to the reasons for believing it.

Of course, responsible writers have to deal with counterarguments and counterevidence. 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. A fair-minded examination of the counterevidence can then occupy as much space as it needs, because its bulk will reflect its importance within that section.

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. These concepts will center on a number of themes which make repeated appearances in the discussion. To keep the text coherent, the writer must allow the reader to keep track of these themes by referring to each in a consistent way or by explaining their connection. We looked at a version of this principle when we saw that to help the reader keep track of a single entity across multiple mentions, a writer should not flip-flop between unnecessary synonyms. Now we can generalize the principle to sets of related concepts, that is, to themes. The writer should refer to each theme in a consistent way, one that allows the reader to know which is which.

Recall from chapter 4 that grammatical categories like adjective are not the same thing as grammatical functions like modifier and complement. People who confuse the two may think that the adjectives in these sentences “modify the verb” and hence ought to be replaced by adverbs.

According to an old rule about “dangling modifiers,” these sentences are ungrammatical. (Sometimes the rule is stated as applying to “dangling participles,” namely the gerund form of a verb ending with –ing or the passive form typically ending in –ed or –en, but the examples include infinitival modifiers as well.) The rule decrees that the implied subject of the modifier (the one doing the checking, turning, and so on) must be identical to the overt subject of the main clause (it, the view, and so on).

Some so-called danglers are perfectly acceptable. Many participles have turned into prepositions, such as according, allowing, barring, concerning, considering, excepting, excluding, failing, following, given, granted, including, owing, regarding, and respecting, and they don’t need subjects at all. Inserting we find or we see into the main clause to avoid a dangler can make the sentence stuffy and self-conscious. More generally, a modifier can dangle when its implied subject is the writer and the reader, as in To summarize and In order to start the motor in the examples above. And when the subject of the main clause is the dummy element it or there, the reader glides right over it, and it poses no danger of attracting a dangler.

Remote conditionals are the finicky ones, though their demands, as we shall see, are not as arbitrary as they at first seem. The formula is that the if-clause must have a past-tense verb, and the then-clause must contain would or a similar auxiliary such as could, should, or might.

In English, a past-tense form is typically used to refer to past time, but it can also be used with a second meaning, factual remoteness. That’s the meaning it’s expressing in the if-clause. Consider the sentence If you left tomorrow, you’d save a lot of money. The verb left couldn’t possibly refer to an event in the past: the sentence says “tomorrow.” But the past-tense form is fine, because it refers to a hypothetical (factually remote) event.

There is one more piece to the puzzle of how to write classy conditionals. Why do they so often contain the verb form had, as in If I hadn’t had my seat belt on, I’d be dead, which sounds better than If I didn’t have my seat belt on, I’d be dead? The key is that had turns up when the if-clause refers to an event whose time of occurrence really is the past. Recall that the if-clause in a remote conditional demands the past tense but has nothing to do with past time. Now when a writer really does want to refer to a past-time event in a remote conditional, he needs the past tense of a past-tense form. The past-of-the-past is called the pluperfect, and it is formed with the auxiliary had, as in I had already eaten.

A good piece of advice on when to pied-pipe and when to strand comes from Theodore Bernstein, who invokes the principle emphasized in chapter 4: select the construction that allows you to end a sentence with a phrase that is heavy or informative or both.

In indirect discourse in the past tense (a staple of news reporting), the tense of a verb often sounds better when it, too, is in the past tense, even though the event was in the present from the vantage point of the person speaking.19 This is clear enough in simple sentences. One would say I mentioned that I was thirsty, not I mentioned that I am thirsty, even though what I actually mentioned at the time was “I am thirsty.”

It would be odd to say The teacher told the class that water froze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems to suggest that perhaps it no longer does; one should violate the backshifting rule here and say The teacher told the class that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.