The cement of reason
In a new book, Steven Pinker teaches everyone how to write well
Like roads, plumbing and medicine, good writing is essential to civilization. When done well, it educates us and sometimes thrills us. When done badly, it leaves us in confusion and ignorance.
Steven Pinker, the Montreal-born Harvard professor of linguistics, can transform any subject that concerns him into an urgent question. He does just that with his smart, funny, argumentative, authoritative and practical new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, published by Penguin.
Many people who write for the public apparently are happy to churn out bureaucratic and academic prose that few can struggle through. Reading government reports often reminds me of what a long-ago Maclean’s editor wrote in the margin of an article submitted for print: “This
Light-before-heavy is an ancient principle in linguistics, discovered by a Sanskrit grammarian in the fourth century B.C.
piece reduces the sum of human knowledge.”
Pinker advocates what he calls “classic style,” a combination of inventiveness, good manners and the awareness of a reader’s needs. In the classic style, the writer pretends to speak conversationally to a single person. But this works only if the writer can overcome the main obstacle to clear prose: “The difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.”
The opposite of classic style is jargon, a language that’s terrifyingly easy to learn. A bright graduate student can produce bales of it without breaking a sweat. There are those who believe scholars use jargon to hide their lack of something to say or to protect their status in a priestly class. Pinker argues otherwise. Many scholars have nothing to hide and no need to impress, he says. He finds them “honest, down-toearth people. Still, their writing stinks.”
Pinker’s research in linguistics has taught him to respect the human “hunger for coherence” and specific easyto-imagine words. The classic style calls for prose that all of us can follow. Readers need to see the connector between the first sentence and the second, between the second and the third. Working on this book, Pinker came to a fresh understanding of connective words, like “but, despite, because, even so, however.” He calls them the cement of reason, “unsung heroes of lucid prose.” (“Cement of reason” is a Pinker-approved phrase.)
He’s full of helpful advice, based on the study of mental processes — including one rule that I’m centuries late in learning: When setting down a series of ideas, “Save the heaviest for last.” He quotes a famous Scottish prayer that used the proper order by asking for deliverance from “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.” Research shows that it’s hard to absorb a series of small details while holding in memory a big one.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” gets it right, as does “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!” Pinker tells us that light-before-heavy is an ancient principle in linguistics, discovered by a Sanskrit grammarian in the fourth century BCE.
Pinker rejects much of the advice given in style books, including old favourites such as “Write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs” and “Never use an uncommon, fancy word when a common, plain one will do.” He praises Margalit Fox, the New York Times obituary writer, who happens to have a masters in linguistics. Pinker collects a few words from her pieces: “hauntingly, flinty, tart-tongued, weepy, hardnosed, astringent, genteelly, risqué, voluptuous, titillating.” Adverbs and adjectives, when well treated, work.
Pinker opposes pointless rules of usage and those who see them as holy writ. His vorpal blade slices through “the pedants, nitpickers, language police, grammar Nazis,” etc. They anger him because their devotion to irrelevant usage muddles the task of explaining the art of writing. As for most of their rules, he’s contemptuous. There’s no reason to avoid splitting an infinitive if it looks and sounds better when split. Captain Kirk is entitled “to boldly go” where he pleases. If he wants to put prepositions at the end of his sentences when he gets there, that’s okay too. And he shouldn’t worry about dangling modifiers: Good literature is full of them.
Pinker’s book will be widely read, often consulted, endlessly argued about. Reading it will improve anyone’s style. Of course, it will never make a bad writer good. Pinker agrees with most accomplished authors that “the starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader.” Pinker would no doubt admit that as an antidote to bad writing, The Sense of Style is necessary but not sufficient.