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.

A bit of extra work

Happy rather belated new year. It's been quite an eventful one for your humble correspondent, as I've recently moved editorial roles from the public sector in Scotland to the private one in Singapore. I've been glad to move out of education and back into the political world: which, as regular readers have probably worked out, holds as much appeal for me as any other aspect of language and communication. Blogging has accordingly been light for the last month or four, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable.

Anyway, I thought I'd try to get back into it by passing on a message from Bertie Wooster in The Mating Season. It's a good piece of advice for just about anyone writing just about anything...

In dishing up this narrative for family consumption, it has been my constant aim throughout to get the right word in the right place and to avoid fobbing the customers off with something weak and inexpressive when they have a right to expect the telling phrase. It means a bit of extra work, but one has one's code.

Standing on the shoulders of seagulls

I'm pleased to present the first guest post on this blog. Here, my friend and colleague (and Natural Sciences student) John Tweedie shares his thoughts on the challenges of communicating science: both within the scientific community and to wider audiences. John also blogs on science, Scottish football, birdwatching, and anything else that takes his fancy.

Knowledge is next to useless if it’s not shared. Knowledge is created by sharing and standing on the shoulders of the proverbial giants who came before. From town criers proclaiming a monarch’s decisions and clans and tribes sharing knowledge through song and poems to the advent of the printing press and the development of the world wide web, people have a thirst for knowledge and an urge to share it with others, be they friends or opponents, colleagues or competitors.

Emerging from the shadows of alchemy through the works of Aristotle and Archimedes and onwards through the Enlightenment to the modern day, science has developed an extensive body of knowledge and various means to communicate, both within science and to the general public.

The scientific method is the accepted way in which science is conducted — a question is posed or an observation is made and a scientist will then develop a hypothesis to find general patterns that underlie the question. Through experiment and further observation, they will refine their hypotheses and so become more confident in their outcomes.

A major part of this process — indeed the main way in which to further develop the hypotheses and build towards the more robust ‘theory’ — is communicating the findings.

There are several ways this can be done. One is to take part in conferences where peers can ask questions about methods used when conducting an investigation and their outcomes. Often these presentations can be used to test early parts of work — is the work well received, or are people picking lots of holes in it? The feedback can send a scientist off in different directions — perhaps their methods have been flawed or their statistics do not support their work. Further revisions and presentations can lead to the work being readied for publication for the wider scientific community to study.

The general process of getting a paper published is regulated by the major journals and through peer review. A paper will be sent out to reviewers who will scrutinise the paper and decide whether it’s fit for publication.

Whether another scientist can or cannot replicate the findings will lend weight to the hypothesis or result in refinements of the hypothesis. Later studies replicating the original investigation may include errors in replicating the experiments, in which case these findings must be published too. In science, negative results are every bit as important as positive results. A good example of this was the recent search for the Higgs boson — a negative result would have meant scientists having to revise their hypotheses and models, which in itself is a continuation of the process of building knowledge.

The most important part of a paper is not the conclusions, but the methods. This is where a scientist demonstrates how they went about answering their question. It’s this part of the paper that allows other scientists to attempt to replicate the experiments and observations conducted. It’s important to note that most scientists work in teams and collaborate within their institutions and with colleagues across the globe, and that published papers often represent the work of many people.

There’s a tension between new discoveries and building on previous knowledge. Scientists must be familiar with the current thinking and all that has gone before in their field.

John James Audubon is well-known for his work in the early 19th century as a field ornithologist and artist. To test whether the turkey vulture had a good sense of smell he put out hidden carcasses, and concluded when the birds didn’t find the meat that they did not have a well-developed sense of smell. Unfortunately for him, his experiment was flawed, because if he had known more about these birds he would know that they prefer fresh carcasses rather than putrefying flesh, and it turned out that the birds he was observing were in fact another species which have a poorer sense of smell than the turkey vulture.  He was also under the mistaken belief that animals can only have one well-developed sense; in other words, if a bird has a good sense of sight they cannot have a good sense of smell.

Much science is highly specialised and only of interest to other scientists, but enough is of potential interest to the general public or considered ground-breaking or to have real-world applications that could solve urgent problems facing humanity and the world today. These papers are picked up and summarised first by popular science magazines which will present as much of the science as possible but for a non-specialist but highly interested and educated audience.

Next up are newspapers and the media — they’ll often simplify the findings, bringing out the practical applications of the science or demonstrating in what way the findings may or may not have revolutionised our knowledge about a particular topic. They’ll often put the science in context with what came before and what the science could lead to in the future.

This is where science communication to the public becomes really important. Science thrives on using precise and specialised language, often underpinned by difficult mathematics or conceptual ideas. The News at Ten is not going to devote time to talking about the intricacies of quantum mechanics: to properly understand such a topic a person really does need an education covering the basics — in this case physics — what an atom is, what it is composed of and how they interact with each other and the transfers of energy.

I have such a lot of respect for many of the science correspondents who can convey complex ideas in the few minutes they get, usually at the tail-end of news programmes. What they do is explain what the science means through using analogies or how the findings are going to find practical uses in the future. Are the results of the findings going to result in faster computers and better communications technologies, are they going to enable effective medical treatments to be created? Most people’s lives have been enriched by the work of scientists: indeed many people are still living due to research, so this is often where the excitement of ‘big science’ is really conveyed.

As much as the general media help to shape public interest in science they also have a responsibility to present it accurately. It’s all too easy to oversimplify the science to make it seem as if a study is something that has a ‘common sense’ answer, something the social sciences are particularly vulnerable to. They could misrepresent the science, leading to confusion and misunderstanding, perhaps undermining public confidence in scientists.

The media can also suggest that ideas are contentious and that there are dissenting voices out there when really there is none within science itself. This is common with climate science where the media, in a mistaken sense of balance and fair play, will allow sceptics or deniers lots of airtime, potentially giving the impression that the scientific consensus is undecided. The BBC has come under particular criticism for this, highlighted in a report by Steve Jones. Many of the sceptics or deniers are not scientists, but are opposed to the idea of what the science represents, either through ideological, political or economic beliefs, and they are particularly concerned with how countries will respond politically or economically to putting in mechanisms to slow down human-caused global warming.

Andrew Wakefield’s now discredited work on the link between the MMR vaccine and autism is a prime example of how irresponsible communication can lead to health scares, and ultimately to deaths. Parents honestly think they're behaving in their children’s' best interests, and often talk about making informed choices for their children, but when the findings of science is misrepresented it can have dire consequences. Many people do not have the scientific education to make truly informed decisions on matters like these and so the media has a responsibility to present findings accurately. This is an example where the peer review process had failed: it should have never have been published in the first case.

As such, I’d like to see scientific communication be a part of all science undergraduate training. Many scientists like to distance themselves from the media and the general public, enclosing themselves in their labs and ivory towers and working in the pursuit of pure science. However, with much science being publicly funded and ultimately having practical applications, scientists should be able to communicate to the press and media. Not everyone can be a Richard Feynman or Carl Sagan, but the ability to communicate clearly to a wide audience is something that should be nurtured. Science has many ideas and words that are used in a specialised way — theory and uncertainty are two examples which the general public do not understand — but scientists should be able to clearly explain what they mean in the context of their work. Often critics say things like ‘it's only a theory’ to shed doubt on evolution, or the public take uncertainty to mean that scientists aren’t sure about their results. These ideas and indeed all science must be clearly communicated.

There are many other mechanisms of science communication. These include popular science books, sometimes written by journalists or historians of science who bring together whole fields and present the science in context, but often by working scientists themselves. Textbooks find their place in university libraries and are only really read by students and other scientists.

Radio is where the voice of scientists is often heard by the general public, rather than their work being interpreted by correspondents as on TV. It’s this medium where they get more time to explain their ideas to the general public, and it’s here that the really good communicators excel.

Some excellent communicators and working scientists, such as Brian Cox and Alice Roberts, are able to work across all media and they really engage the public, often enthusing about science and encouraging the next generation of scientists. They present big ideas that are exciting — normally little knowledge is expected of the audience, although sometimes, like Jim Al-Khalili, they’ll present more difficult concepts, expecting the audience to keep up.

All of these examples show just how wide and varied science communication is. Science is incredibly important to our societies — its developments enable our way of life to be possible — we live longer, we can access information on any topic at any time in just a few seconds, we can travel hundreds of kilometres in a few hours, we can talk to our friends and families instantly living on the opposite side of the planet, and in the developed world we have more leisure time due to developments in technology, often derived from pure science.

We’ve put men on the Moon and to the bottom of the oceans, we’ve sent probes to other planets, one has just left the Solar System, and a rover is sending back information from another planet. We know how old our Solar System is and how long it’s expected to last.

All of this science has had an amazing impact and it will continue for as long as we keep asking questions and enquiring about how the world and the Universe works, with communication being at the heart of the process.

I suppose I ought to try and offer some sort of partial defence of the media's coverage of climate change. It's very hard for those of us on the other side of CP Snow's two cultures to accept that contentious issues can be genuinely settled one way or another, and we're right not to accept it in other areas: we journalists have a healthy scepticism towards authority which helps keep politicians and bureaucrats in check the rest of the time (or, at least, it does until they decide it won't any more).

There clearly is still a genuine debate about what to do about climate change, even if there's no longer a debate about the science itself (or, at least, the science so far rather than its extrapolations in the decades to come). I hope this secondary debate — essentially, should we risk short-term economic growth by trying to stem carbon emissions, or should we accept a warming world and instead spend our wealth on better adapting to it? — will now become the focus of the mainstream media's coverage. This Economist leader, for instance, seems to get the balance right.

Though this be madness, yet there is method innit

Radio 4 had a useful addition last night to the points made by David Foster Wallace on the necessity of teaching formalised standard English to children who otherwise won't be exposed to it.

Noting that brevity is the soul of wit, self-made south Londoner Lindsay Johns' 15-minute lecture bemoans our tolerance of ghetto language; its speakers must be taught how to communicate the way mainstream society does, so that they can fully participate in it. The argument goes: language is power, there is an existing power structure, it has an existing linguistic structure, so outsiders need to learn it to have any access to power. Have a listen and see what you think.

 

His view — far harder for those of us who aren't black or working-class to express — is that the 'soft bigotry of low expectations' is at best counterproductive and at worst actually more racist than demanding a more clear and consistent command of vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. I've no idea how much linguistic relativism there is in today's urban comprehensives: I would have thought its deficiencies were obvious enough by now, but perhaps the fact he still feels the need to give this talk suggests the mindset lingers.

 

One might also take arms against his insistence that a hip-hop version of Hamlet is 'evil': if it acts as a bridge between no Shakespeare and pure Shakespeare then isn't that better than nothing? I don't think it's culturally relativist to say that Hamlet, unadulterated, could on first reading be intimidating for a young person with low levels of literacy and no previous exposure to classical literature, whatever their ethnicity. So there's an argument for easing them into it. A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear and all that.

 

For the white middle-class liberals he criticises, the whole thing is of course an amusing parlour game. Whenever the possibility of teaching rules of language or grammar is raised, an army of clever clogs is on hand to point out that these rules are no such thing, that the idea of 'proper' English is a Victorian myth, and so on. At their own level of ability, they're right: but as Johns articulates, inner city kids need to be taught some rules before they can successfully break any of them. As the Prince of Denmark himself puts it: "Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."

Sword's mighty pen

"Writing is a central activity in higher education across disciplines", writes Helen Sword in an example of a boring opening sentence.

 

Her treatise on stylish academic writing is a few years old now, but it's very well judged: a sort of updated version of Orwell's modern translation of Ecclesiastes, also bringing to mind Alan Sokal's great skewering of meaningless postmodern jargon.

 

It doesn't surprise me that she was inspired to write her manifesto on style — which appeared in Studies in Higher Education and which she expanded into a book — by her experiences in education, which tends to be one of the most jargon-heavy, outsider-excluding disciplines. A lot of people in education — and not just higher education — would do well to study her wise witticisms like "The crucial question for academic writers is not how to avoid jargon altogether but how to keep language at once precise and rich", "The old myth that impersonal = objective = scientifically superior still holds firm in many social scientists' minds" and "Stylish prose favours the reader, whereas stodgy prose favours the writer".

 

Much of the text I now work with could best be described as defensive: everything is hedged with an 'and/or' or an 'if appropriate' or a 'while ensuring specified guidelines are followed at all times'. Writers of passive, bureaucratic stuff like this think they're covering their backs, but really they're just patronising and annoying their readers (not that we couldn't all do with losing a bit of flab).

 

Academic writing, like political communications, is fundamentally different from corporate or organisational material in that its main purpose is usually to persuade the reader of the value of an idea, rather than just to convey information. As such, it needs to be stylish as well as clear. Higher education is more competitive than ever: a huge amount of research is now published, and most of it is excruciatingly boring and narrow enough to interest only a very few readers, if any. To stand out, academics need to be able to produce original work that draws from all sorts of areas, and to sell it in an engaging way.

 

One of her complaints is how rarely academics with interesting personal stories to tell actually let their own views and experiences come through in their writing (not a problem many journalists have). This fine piece of Swordsmanship shows why it's worth putting the effort in to bring your own voice out, even if she gets a bit carried away sometimes (funky cowboy boots and purple hair, eh?).

 

Finally, note how often the names of superstar academics cropped up in the survey of stylish peers: Pinker, Schama, Dawkins. Do they, having won fame, feel less constrained by the rules (or myths) holding back other academics: or did their stylish, ranging writing win them a big audience in the first place?

The next large scale innovator disruptor in the quickly dying education market?

A pal writes in:

"Not sure you'll get all this — you need to read the pompous piece it's responding to but I thought it was such a hilarious pricking of a balloon that I thought you should point to it in your blog."

Done!

Testing, testing

I see the grammar debate is back in the news.  Rather tediously, and like so many of these issues, the argument often collapses into two unappealing opposites, when a perfectly sensible and uncontroversial middle ground needn't be beyond our wit.

On the one hand, there is the view that there is no such thing as standard grammar (as argued, rather eliptically, by Michael Rosen) and that, as Charlie Higson puts it, "You can't teach English without teaching grammar, it's inherent."  On the other, there is the view that grammar does have fixed rules and that these need to be not just taught but regularly tested.

I argue that one need not be a linguistic prescriptivist with a sort of Euclidean belief in a set of immutable laws — arbitrary archaisms governing when to use 'shall' and when to use 'will', how to not split infinitives, and so on — to recognise the value of having a decent grasp of the forms of sentence structure and orthography commonly used in British English to facilitate clarity in written and spoken communication.  The sad reality is that many children will not be exposed to this outside the classroom and will not have them on hand when they first go for an interview.  The controversy seems to be about whether teaching critical analysis of Shakespeare, Burns, Orwell and the rest of them will automatically embed a working grasp of these useful conventions, or whether this needs to be done separately and explicitly.

Here comes the smug middle-ground bit, and the plug for my employers.  In Scotland, I think we've got the balance about right now.  At SQA we've recognised that this osmotic assumption is a bit out of date.  That's why we've taken advantage of a new, modular setup to include distinct units in Literacy that will be incorporated into English (and Gàidhlig) courses.  In much the same way, we've acknowledged that teaching the -ometries in Maths doesn't necessarily produce numerically competent and confident school-leavers, so we've done the same with Numeracy units.  We've also opted to combine continuous coursework with final exams, which again seems to me preferable to a system of assessment based entirely on one or the other.

(Perhaps this is all unnecessary though; the best argument we could present to teenage boys is that a good grasp of grammar will help you get not just jobs but girls.)

It's depressing that this gets hijacked into another interminable left/right argument.  By now, we really should be able to agree that if grammatical rules aid clarity and comprehension we should keep them, encourage them, and teach them to children; if not, we shouldn't bother with them.  Why we can't just accept this principle then work out the details, rather than turn it into a partisan political debate, is completely beyond me.  How many other countries do this?

Perhaps the reason is that, as Chris Cook puts it, "90% of education 'commentary' reflects the writer's own school neuroses."  I couldn't possibly comment...