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

by Steven Pinker

well-written prose puts object relative clauses in the passive voice, and difficult prose keeps them in the active voice,

the writer’s goal is to encode a web of ideas into a string of words using a tree of phrases. Aspiring wordsmiths would do well to cultivate this awareness. It can help rid their writing of errors, dead ends, and confusing passages. And it can take the fear and boredom out of grammar, because it’s always more inviting to master a system when you have a clear idea of what it is designed to accomplish.

Whenever one sentence comes after another, readers need to see a connection between them. So eager are readers to seek coherence that they will often supply it when none exists.

One way to fashion an outline is to jot your ideas on a page or on index cards more or less at random and then look for ones that seem to belong together. If you reorder the items with the clusters of related ideas placed near one another, then arrange the clusters that seem to belong together in larger clusters, group those into still larger clusters, and so on, you’ll end up with a treelike outline.

regardless of how many headings or signposts you use, 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.

there is no such thing as a paragraph. That is, there is no item in an outline, no branch of a tree, no unit of discourse that consistently corresponds to a block of text delimited by a blank line or an indentation. What does exist is the paragraph break: a visual bookmark that allows the reader to pause, take a breather, assimilate what he has read, and then find his place again on the page.

Inexperienced writers tend to be closer to academics than to journalists and use too few paragraph breaks rather than too many. It’s always good to show mercy to your readers and periodically let them rest their weary eyes. Just be sure not to derail them in the middle of a train of thought. Carve the notch above a sentence that does not elaborate or follow from the one that came before.

Parallel syntax is just the Rule of One Variable applied to writing: if you want readers to appreciate some variable, manipulate the expression of that variable alone while keeping the rest of the language unchanged.

If while is used in a temporal sense (“at the same time”), it implies similarity; if it is used in a logical sense (“although”), it suggests contrast.

it’s good for a writer to work with the ongoing newsreel in readers’ minds and describe events in chronological order: She showered before she ate is easier to understand than She ate after she showered. For the same reason, After she showered, she ate is easier than Before she ate, she showered.

If you do indicate a connection, though, do it just once. Prose becomes stuffy when an insecure writer hammers the reader over the head with redundant indicators of a connection, as if unsure that one would be enough.

If you try to repair an incoherent text and find that no placement of therefores and moreovers and howevers will hold it together, that is a sign that the underlying argument may be incoherent, too.

The confusing opening of A History of Warfare provides us with an opportunity to look at three other contributors to coherence, which are conspicuous here by their absence: clear and plausible negation, a sense of proportion, and thematic consistency.

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

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. As a result, when we have a lot on our minds, we can get confused about where the “false” tag belongs, or can forget it entirely. In that case what is merely mentioned can become true. Richard Nixon did not allay suspicions about his character when he declared, “I am not a crook,” nor did Bill Clinton put rumors to rest when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

The cognitive difference between believing that a proposition is true (which requires no work beyond understanding it) and believing that it is false (which requires adding and remembering a mental tag) has enormous implications for a writer.

negation is easy to understand when the proposition being negated is plausible or tempting.

when a writer wants to negate an unfamiliar proposition, she should unveil the negation in two stages: 1. You might think . . . 2. But no.

Here’s a rule: Never write a sentence of the form “X not Y because Z,” such as Dave is not evil because he did what he was told. It should be either Dave is not evil, because he did what he was told, where the comma keeps the because outside the scope of the not, or Dave is evil not because he did what he was told (but for some other reason), where the because occurs next to the not, indicating that it is within its scope.

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.

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.

The writer should refer to each theme in a consistent way, one that allows the reader to know which is which.

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 maintaining a sense of harmony and balance.

That’s right: when it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.