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.

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?

Tricolon cancer

It seems classical rhetoric has a place in modern communication strategy after all. Have a look at Cancer Research's use of omne trium perfectum in this new poster I saw on the underground this week: I think it works very nicely. They're also taking Owen Jones' advice and telling stories rather than quoting a bunch of boring facts and stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of charities have turned into political lobbying machines and so become distrusted by a jaded public; the more organisations like Cancer Research can show that they stick to their basic purpose, the more they can convince us to fund them. I think campaigns like this will certainly help.

Period drama

As our American cousins go to the polls, readers of this blog need not fear that important issues like full stops and exclamation marks have been overlooked in the campaign.

And yet, the best communicators are like field marshals, attending to the broad sweep of rhetorical strategy as well as the details of syntax and orthography. Obama was praised for just such 'soaring oratory' in 2008, though inevitably there's been less sign of that this time.

In the end, the result will probably come down to which candidate has done a better job of framing the language used to describe his policies, record and background — and surely no-one can seriously think that leaves us with Mitt '1%' Romney.