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Interview with Steven Pinker about writing and Linguistics.
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What Can Linguistics Tell Us About Writing Better? An Interview with
Steven Pinker. By Gretchen McCulloch
(Interiew)
I talked recently with Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct and
other books about language and the mind, about his new book, The Sense of
Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
This seems like quite a different topic from your previous books.
Why write about style?
For me, it's the perfect intersection of one of my professional interests,
which is trying to convey complex phenomena in clear prose, and the area
that I study, which is to say language and cognition.
What do linguistics and cognitive science have to add to a
discussion of style?
The major difference between The Sense of Style and other style guides is
that I try to use the science of language and mind to provide more
systematic and motivated advice. Most style guides reiterate rules of thumb
that were stated in previous style guides or the accumulated body of wisdom
of some writer or editor. And so the entire discipline of linguistics and
cognitive science that has come about in the past 60 years just plays no role
in most style guides.
But there's a lot that can be learned from the history of criticism and the
analysis of usage, the insights of grammar, the discussion of what ought to
be used and not used, where various rules and shibboleths come from, and
my own field, the science of cognition and how understanding comes from
language.
Joseph Williams' book—simply called Style—comes close: It's a discussion of
the science of discourse comprehension and some of the discussion of usage
controversies like who ever thought you couldn't split an infinitive. But I
thought that the world could use a style guide that took advantage of that
kind of scholarship.
What do you think good and bad style look like?
It's about clarity, which is not to neglect grace and beauty—language ought
to be a source of pleasure. When a striking image effectively conveys an idea
or a feeling, you simultaneously know what the author is trying to
communicate and you get that shiver of pleasure that makes reading an
enjoyable experience.
Your book also has a lot of examples of writing
passages. (Disclosure: I received an advance copy of The Sense of
Style.)
I practice what I preach, and I preach the merits of using concrete examples,
so it wouldn't be worth saying "Here's an example of things to do" without
giving examples. I think generalizations without examples and examples
without generalizations are both useless: If you give a list of examples of
wretched writing without pointing out what's wretched about them, you
can't trust that people will draw the lesson that you're looking for, but if you
give a general principle to avoid without giving examples, you can't trust
that people will be able to apply the principle when they actually go to write
something.
In general the human mind is surprisingly concrete—it's more common to
write badly by being too abstract, too highfalutin, than by being too
concrete, too down to earth. There are examples of both, but it's harder to be
concrete.
But that being said, the emphasis in many style manuals on plain style has
been taken to an extreme, especially in the early part of the 20th century,
where the style guides were a reaction to the ornate style of the 19th
century. So you have advice on never using alliteration, never using an
ornate word when a simple one will do, when really language can be clear
and stylish without being abstemious and puritanical.
Hence why you propose classic style?
Yeah, classic style—a concept that I took from Francis-Noël Thomas and
Mark Turner—is a style that they contrast with plain style. It doesn't have
a specific goal like providing the reader with information, which is the goal
of plain style. Rather, classic style prizes clarity as the ultimate virtue: It
simulates a scenario where the writer has noticed something in the world
that the reader has not yet noticed, and so the writer places the reader in a
position to notice that thing and the reader can see it with their own eyes.
The goal is to get the reader to see the truth, which the writing has made
self-evident.
Are there limitations to classic style?
Yeah, that's a good question. Clearly there are times when you do want to
use a plain and practical style: if you're writing to tell someone how to set a
digital clock or fill out a tax return, for example. Or if you're a preacher or
moral leader who wants to whip up the emotions of a crowd, you want to use
rhetorical and emotional styles, not classic style. But for exposition,
commentary, review and other writing in that genre, then classic style
coincides with the intuitions of many of us for what makes for good writing.
I mean, there's also a personal, reflective style where the author makes an
attempt to reflect on personal experience, and some people do enjoy this
type of romantic style, but few writers can pull it off, so probably a more
realistic expectation for most journalists and essayists is to aim for classic
style.
This idea that there's a correct style for all occasions is a shortcoming of
many of the existing style manuals: They're often directed at students and
tell everyone to write in plain style. Plain style is reasonable advice for
student five-paragraph essays, and other kinds of prose that should be in a
fixed template, such as instructions, stock prospectuses, and journal
articles, but more discursive writing styles can't and shouldn't be done
according to a rigid recipe. And yet many of the style manuals will tell you
to state the topic of each paragraph and never use a long word when a
shorter one will do, and so on. In fact, we see good writers violate this advice
all the time, because they're not writing in plain style, they're writing in
classic or another style. So that's part of the reason why the entire genre of
the style manual has come into disrepute—it just seems so dull and
puritanical. But it's really only plain style that's dull and puritanical.
The fallacy that there's only one style also frequently leads to the ridiculous
questions you see in the media because it assumes that the language used in
texting or in tweeting will necessarily bleed over to other styles. But look, if
we're delivering a eulogy at a funeral we automatically use a different style
than when we're texting our spouse or our friend—it doesn't mean that
people are so obtuse that we're going to deploy the texting style in any
situation without thinking of the social context. Any usable style guide has
to distinguish between various types of style.
There's actually a recent xkcd comic about how texting is a
valuable type of peer language practice rather than causing a
decline in language.
Oh neat! I haven't seen that one, but I love xkcd.
How has your experience writing for a popular audience influenced
your ability to write a style guide?
Writing this book definitely led me to reflect back on what I do when I think
to myself, "Don't write like an academic, write clearly and vigorously." One
of the reasons that I enjoyed the Thomas and Turner book is that I thought
they captured in a coherent way many of the rules of thumb that were
floating around in my head when I started unlearning my habits of
academese—namely, this idea of directing a reader's attention to something
the world.
The reason that this was so profound in my view is that the greatest sin of a
scholar is naive realism: that you can just open your eyes and see the world
objectively as it is. As scholars, we're all too conscious of the fact that we're
susceptible to bias and that we have illusions, and this anxiety creeps into
everything we write. But good clear writing works under the pretense that
naive realism is true, so the naive realist is a bad scholar but a good writer.
And then in the desire not to be seen as a naive realist, academics add all
these hedges to their writing, like "virtually," "to some extent," and so on. So
in academic writing, nothing is described as it is, but always via the tools we
use to understand it: "levels of consumption have increased"; whereas
vigorous writing describes the phenomenon itself: "people eat more."
Does that mean that academic writers shouldn't be using classic
style?
No, I think classic style is also a boon to academic writing. The thing is, you
have to separate style from content, so if a conclusion is uncertain or it
applies to some cases but not others, you need to just say that. Instead of
sprinkling words like relatively and virtually in every phrase, you can add
in the specific qualification of where something holds and where it doesn't.
For example, instead of saying that democracies are relatively less likely to
go to war with each other more often, you can say democracies are 15
percent less likely to go to war with each other. Or instead of women are
relatively better at verbal fluency than men—but you don't want to make an
essentialist claim, so you'd better hedge that—you can say "on average" or
"but this doesn't mean that every woman is better at verbal fluency than
every man" rather than muddying up your prose as a way of softening the
claim.
A good writer takes advantage of the ordinary charity that we must indulge
in during everyday conversation, the Gricean maxims of cooperation,
the commonsense of the reader that means you wouldn't interpret a
generalization as a law. And the exception that proves the rule is legalese,
where you don't have the presumption of cooperation that you have in
ordinary conversation, so you have to include all these qualifications to
preemptively anticipate an uncooperative reader.
So, legalese we're stuck with?
Well, but legalese can also be made less impenetrable. In fact, there's a
movement in the legal profession to reduce legalese to the minimum
necessary, because a lot of legalese doesn't serve that purpose of
anticipating an uncooperative reader. For example, "the party of the first
part" actually serves no purpose whatsoever. It could be removed from every
single legal document, and replaced it with "Jones" or whatever, and it
would not have any bearing on the legal interpretation but it would make
the document a heck of a lot easier to read. A lot of legalese is just
professional bad bits carried over from one generation of lawyers to another
with no good reason.
Improving legalese is actually a high priority because there's so much waste
and suffering that results from impenetrable legalese: People don't
understand what their rights are because they don't understand a contract
or they waste money hiring expensive lawyers to decipher contracts for
them. I think there's a high moral value in reducing legalese to the bare
minimum.
How do you reconcile taking a stance on what constitutes "good"
writing with being a descriptivist with respect to language in
general?
I think that the general attitude that scientists of language aren't there to
pass judgement is a good one, but linguists do have insights that can be
applied to how we go about using language and I'd like to see more of them.
You do have some intelligent commentary on Language Log but as far as
usage goes, they tend to focus on debunking the usage myths that make
their way into the media. That's useful, but there's also a lot in linguistics
that helps explain the reaction to prose that's turgid or confusing, you
know, garden path sentences and so on.
There are well-established areas in applied linguistics like foreign
languages, speech therapy, machine translation, but it's odd considering the
demand that stylistics isn't a well-established branch of applied linguistics.
We're really leaving it to all these people who don't know about applied
linguistics, perhaps because we've so overgeneralized the fear of confusing
descriptivism and prescriptivism, that we haven't realized that when it
comes to prescription we actually have something to say.
William Safire, actually, would sometimes consult Jim McCawley and me
for his language columns. He didn't make a habit of it, but he did
sometimes. And, I mean, considering that I once wrote an article that
satirized him quite heavily, he had no reason to like me, but he was quite
magnanimous. We actually became—well, I wouldn't say we were friends,
but we did become quite friendly.
A lot of style books seem to believe that people write badly because
of some moral failing: they're lazy or ignorant or poorly educated.
And yet that's not the stance you take in The Sense of Style: Why do
you think bad writing happens?
For a number of reasons. The first is that good writing is hard: It's not
something that people avoid in order to deliberatively sound pretentious and
ponderous. In fact, it's hard work to sound simple and natural.
And second, a lot of the sins and failing in language may not actually be sins
and failings if you take a more realistic usage of how language is used—
they're fully consistent with how good writing looks in the past.
And finally, turgid writing and some of the other flaws of academic prose
are hazards of the profession: You forget that the tools that have become
clear to you are confusing to everyone else. So you start to start to write
about concepts and frameworks, which are tools used by experts, instead of
the objects in the real world, which is how non-experts think of things. For
example, instead of talking about calling the police, an expert talks about
"approaching things from a law-enforcement perspective."
How would you say our notion of what constitutes good style has
changed in the past few hundred years? What do you think the
future of good style looks like?
It's certainly changed over the long run, and I think there's been an ongoing
trend to plainer, simpler language. By contemporary standards, a lot of the
nineteenth-century essays and speeches strike us as flowery and ornate,
because in the meantime there's been a general streamlining.
So what next? Well, I don't want to call it post-modern because that's its
own style which is opaque and pretentious, but whether there will be a
reaction to that, with more poetic sentences and imagery, as a backlash to
the sparseness, who knows?
So you're not going to go on record as saying that we'll all be
speaking with emoji or something like that?
(Laughter) Definitely not!
There are always people who are reacting to style—there are people who
will push ornateness to more sparseness, or when things get too abstemious
people will push in a direction of color and flamboyance. Language change
doesn't happen according to a planned direction; it meanders throughout
various possible languages.
Your earlier books are the kind of thing that I think get people into
linguistics, which isn't necessarily what one would expect from a
style book. But The Sense of Style includes syntax trees, which
probably aren't typical fare for style books, so do you think this is
also a book that might whet people's appetites for more linguistics?
I sure hope so! It is in a very real sense a book about applied linguistics, and
in order to do that it has a smidgen of linguistic theory, enough that people
can understand terms like subordinate clause and the tree diagrams. Now,
in doing so I had to choose my grammatical theory carefully, because it had
to be one that would lend itself to applied linguistics, and in particular I
needed one that would cover all the edge cases of English including those
that cause usage controversy. So that ruled out a lot of the formal
approaches that you see in the literature these days.
I ended up going with the version in the Cambridge Grammar of the
English Languageby Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, which is
this giant doorstop of a book! But you need that comprehensiveness. For
example, in "he's one of those guys who's always complaining about his job,"
it's idiomatic to use the singular, although most grammars, bringing it back
to the parse tree, would tell you to make it plural, to say "he's one of those
guys who are always complaining about their jobs." So why is the idiom the
singular version? Well, it turns out that Huddleston and Pullum have
analyzed all these weird edge cases, and in fact they provide an insightful
analysis for why the singular sounds grammatical in that example. And
none of the other technical literature would give you an exhaustive
treatment like that.
Is there anything else you'd like to say about The Sense of Style?
I'd say the book has two purposes.
The first is a practical source of advice on how to write more clearly, not just
for academics or professionals who want to branch out or be clearer on the
job, but also for people who want to start a blog or series of reviews or
anything like that.
The second purpose is if you're curious about what makes good writing good,
or stuffy writing stuffy, just as popular science, I like to think the book can
explain what makes good language good using linguistics and cognitive
science. It's also an expository book, so it clusters with my earlier books
about language for people who are interested in how language works where
style is just a set of phenomena that I'm trying to illuminate. So even if you
never write yourself but are a consumer of writing and are curious about
why you as a reader have the reactions you do, why you enjoy certain styles
and not others, I like to think the book will help explain those puzzles.
The Sense of Style is available as of today, September 30th.
Gretchen McCulloch is a linguist and writer. She has a master's in
linguistics from McGill University and blogs daily at All Things
Linguistic.