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.

Style and substance

I've recently been reading F. L. Lucas's Style: the art of writing well, a rediscovered classic whose basic tenets are nicely summarised here. So far, this blog has mostly concentrated on clarity and concision, and given little attention to writing that is amusing, awful and artificial. Lucas's book is a masterclass in writing prose that is both clear and a delight to read. Here he is on our own favourite topic, the importance of communicating clearly:

For two thousand years Christendom has been rent with controversy because men could not agree about the meaning of passages in Holy Writ; both Old and New Testaments have been more disputed than any human will. The gardens and porticoes of philosophy are hung with philosophers entangled in their own verbal cobwebs. Statesmen meet at Yalta or Potsdam to make agreements, about the meaning of which they then proceed to disagree. Employers and workers reach settlements that lead only to fresh unsettlement, because they misunderstand the understandings they themselves have made. Sharp legal minds spend their lives drafting documents in a verbose jargon of their own which shall be knave-proof and foolproof; but it is seldom that other legal minds as sharp cannot find in those documents, if they try, some fruitful points for litigation. Even in war, where clarity may be a matter of life or death for thousands, disasters occur through orders misunderstood. Some adore ambiguities in poetry; in prose they can be a constant curse. 

For example it seems that, within a few hours in the Crimea, first of all Lord Cardigan's misinterpreting of Lord Lucan's orders wasted the victory of the Heavy Brigade, and then Lord Lucan's misinterpreting of Lord Raglan's orders caused the suicide of the Light Brigade. It is said that Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma in a statute of Edward III. And Professor Ifor Evans has adduced the strange case of Caleb Diplock who bequeathed half a million for 'charitable or benevolent objects'. Clear enough, one would have thought — though needlessly verbose. But the law regularly sacrifices brevity to make sure of clarity — and too often loses both. In this case legal lynxes discerned that 'benevolent' objects are not necessarily 'charitable'. The suit was carried from the Court of First Instance to the Court of Appeal, from the Court of Appeal to the Lords; judges uttered seventy thousand words of collective wisdom; and poor Mr Diplock's will was pronounced invalid. Much virtue in an 'or'. Well did the Chinese say that when a piece of paper blows into a law-court, it may take a yoke of oxen to drag it out again.

Nelson Jones once described Laurie Penny's writing (a bit unfairly) as 'not so much a triumph of style over substance as the use of style to obliterate any possibility of substance'. If he wants her to write with better style, more substance and greater clarity, he should start by giving her a copy of Lucas's masterpiece.