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Steven Pinker’s how-to guide is a jewel

Reading time: 5 minutes 

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We owe Steven Pinker a debt of gratitude. His 2014 book The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century is a wonderful grammar/syntax/style/usage guide. If you don’t already own it, gift it to yourself this year. A Harvard psychology and linguistics professor as well as a best-selling author, Pinker is interested in cognition and language, proposing cognitive science as the basis for clarity in writing.

While he loves style manuals, many “treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation. But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore and myth” (Pinker). “Standards of usage are desirable”, he writes, yet “many prescriptive rules originated for screwball reasons”. His professional acquaintance with language “has led me to read the traditional manuals with a growing sense of unease. Strunk and White, for all their intuitive feel for style, had a tenuous grasp of grammar” (Pinker). Further, the orthodox style books

are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn. Yet the authors of the classic manuals wrote as if the language they grew up with were immortal, and failed to cultivate an ear for ongoing change… Much advice on style is stern and censorious… The classic manuals, written by starchy Englishmen and rock-ribbed Yankees, try to take all the fun out of writing, grimly adjuring the writer to avoid offbeat words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration. (Pinker).

Pinker’s discomfort with the classic style manuals “has convinced me that we need a writing guide for the twenty-first century”: “A manual for the new millennium cannot just perpetuate the diktats of earlier manuals. Today’s writers… deserve not to be patronized at any age. They rightly expect reasons for any advice that is foisted upon them” (Pinker). As he provides thoughtful rationales for his recommendations, his book “will be appreciated by… writers who want to know the logic behind the rules” (Tate). Pinker “always brings us back to the why, not just the what and the how” (Tate).

“[Charting] a course between rigid prescriptivists and laid-back descriptivists” (Davies), Pinker has written a very useful, up-to-date guide for those who want to improve the dexterity of their prose. The book is anything but dry and boring. Among others, he addresses the classic style, paragraph assembly, sentence construction, punctuation and pitfalls. Along with examples of excellent and bad writing, there are also cartoons and jokes. Pinker “offers comfort to the multitudes who feel flummoxed by the bitter and windy debate about correctness” (Davies) in a guide that’s “a cure for… academese, bureaucratese, corporatese, legalese, medicalese, or officialese” (Pinker).

Various reviewers have pointed to chapters that, on their own, are worth the book’s price. A favourite of mine is chapter 4, “The Web, the String, and the Tree”. According to Pinker, these are “the three things that grammar brings together: the web of ideas in our head, the string of words that comes out of our mouth or fingers, and the tree of syntax that converts the first into the second”. Rich in diagrams, it is largely concerned with the ways different kinds of words work together in sentences and how, as readers and writers, our brains group words and ideas into clusters to produce meaning. Communication seeks to transfer a web of ideas from one mind to another. This chapter is a gift, because it makes sentence construction completely transparent, opening the door to our being able to begin to master writing.

Unsurprisingly, Nathan Heller, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has little good to say about the book: “Most of [Pinker’s] amendments… make the language more confused… He says that his new rules are graceful, but the standards of grace seem to be mainly his own… This tendency to add complexity, ambiguity, and doubt is a troubling feature of Pinker’s rules. He fights pedantry with more pedantry”.

The New Yorker has an outlier, ultra-prescriptivist approach to all things language. It uses spellings that are otherwise little used in U.S. English, spells out numerical amounts (e.g. two million five hundred thousand dollars, instead of $2.5 million), insists on using the diaeresis in words with doubled vowels “to prevent misreading of words that no one has trouble reading, and it doubles consonants in words like focussed because it said so, that’s why. It also unnecessarily sets off certain phrases with commas based on a hyperliteral idea of what restrictive and nonrestrictive mean. Tell me that’s not mercilessly evil” (Owen). The New Yorker’s style, which Jonathon Owen calls “distractingly idiosyncratic” and arrantly pedantic, led to one of his favourite tweets – by Benjamin Dreyer: One’s house style oughtn’t to be visible from outer space. #totallynotasubtweet

Granted, some of Pinker’s choices are tendentious: He seems unwilling to concede that ‘very unique’ is problematic (something is either unique or not). Also, I disagree with him that fewer vs. less is a question of doing whatever sounds good. But these are easy adjustments to make. Here’s Kirkus Reviews: “… this is one of the best [how-to books on writing] to come along in many years, a model of intelligent signposting and syntactical comportment… we’re lucky that, like fellow manual writer Stephen King, he’s blessed with common sense.” Pinker’s book “is a worthy addition to any writer’s library… is full of gems” (Tate).

“To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures” (Pinker). “Good writing can flip the way the world is perceived, like the silhouette in psychology textbooks which oscillates between a goblet and two faces” (Pinker). According to Pinker, style “still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their messages across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose… Second, style earns trust… Style, not least, adds beauty to the world”. Style matters because, now more than ever, writing is “the currency of our social and cultural lives” (Pinker).

Sources

Steven Pinker: The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. 2014, Penguin.
Stephen King: On writing: A memoir of the craft. 2000, Hodder and Stoughton.
Kirkus Reviews: The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century by Steven Pinker26 July 2014.
Peter Conrad: The sense of style – Steven Pinker’s comedy of linguistic bad manners15 September 2014.
Dave Driftless: The Seventh Sense?
Kristen Tate: Book review: The Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker29 September 2019. 
Stevie Davies: The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker, book review: Ways to write in the 21st century4 September 2014.
Jonathon Owen: Umlauts, diaereses, and the New Yorker. 24 March 2020.
Jonathon Owen: The style guide alignment chart3 September 2019.
Nathan Heller: Steven Pinker’s bad grammar3 November 2014.