The Sense of Style

I've lately finished reading The Sense of Style, the latest effort by Steven Pinker. I was already a big fan of his after getting through The Better Angels of Our Nature last year: at 1056 pages, it's perfect for caving your enemies' skulls in and chaining to the feet of their womenfolk to stop them escaping.

Seriously though, I'd rank Better Angels alongside The Selfish Gene as the non-fiction book that's most impressed me. Pinker's scholarly but stylish mix of hard evidence and illuminating examples from every cultural corner adds up to an overwhelming case for liberal institutions, democracy and the rule of law as the happiest alternative to religious, left- or right-wing forms of populist authoritarianism.

I also enjoyed his The Blank Slate, which I recently read on a long train journey around south-east Asia and which puts the noble savage – and other romantic, behaviourist or postmodern challenges to the idea of a common, underlying and inescapable human nature – to the overdue sword.

The Sense of Style is another impressive piece of work. Unless you always happen to have on hand an editor who prioritises clarity and concision over adherence to arbitrary rules (hem hem), you'll find it helpful if you're keen to sharpen your writing. Pinker explores many of the points I've pushed the writers in my team to pay attention to, including why and how to:

• repeatedly revise our writing, then get someone else to do so as well
• (generally) use active rather than passive sentences
• avoid nominalisations (turning simple verbs into complicated nouns)
• be wary of 'scare quotes', clichés and idioms (lest the reader get the wrong end of the stick)
• keep singular or plural subjects and verbs in agreement, and keep an eye on the structure of our sentences
• avoid jargon and make sure we don't assume too much knowledge on the part of the reader
• cut unnecessary words
• avoid convoluted sub-clauses and ambiguous phrases
• use prepositions to aid clarity
• order sentences into coherent paragraphs, and work out where to put paragraph breaks (often one of the tasks I find trickiest)
• be aware of which supposed grammatical rules we should follow, and which we can ignore

It's no coincidence that (following Helen Sword) an academic so good at cutting through fashionable bullshit in other people's writing has produced a style guide that helps us cut through the bullshit in our own. Pinker's guide is perhaps not always as entertaining to read as F. L. Lucas's Style, though it still has plenty of amusing examples of bad writing. Either way, those of us who have to write for our supper in business, academia or the public sector can do ourselves and our readers a service by studying it.

Rectify the names

Hello again, dear reader. My previous post proved perspicacious: I have indeed been rather busy of late, mostly with the new day job – about which I will soon write more – but also with occasionally contributing to the Spectator's Culture House blog. Like a preacher who by day rails against every sin under the sun then by night smokes crack with rent boys, so I murder everyone else's darlings in a professional capacity then spawn a surfeit of my own for fun.

Anyway, I forget how the conversation started, but a pal and I the other day were pondering which countries officially prefix their names with the definite article. I Googled this, and the answer is that there are only two: The Gambia and The Bahamas. (Later, at work, I and a couple of our writers agonised over whether 'Maldives' should take an informal 'the'; opinion was divided, but the majority thought it should.)

The BBC article that answered our question also turned up this interesting quote, which I thought I'd share with you. You can consider it an early example of hard nominative determinism.

One day, a disciple asked Confucius: "If a king were to entrust you with a territory which you could govern according to your ideas, what would you do first?" 

Confucius replied: "My first task would certainly be to rectify the names." 

The puzzled disciple asked: "Rectify the names? Is this a joke?" 

Confucius replied: "If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language is without an object, action becomes impossible – and therefore all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible. Hence, the very first task of a true statesman is to rectify the names."