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.

D'you know what I mean?

In a slight departure from the usual fare, here's Noel Gallagher in GQ sharing his thoughts on all those titles of creative works that have nothing to do with their subject matter (a point I've put less persuasively). It made me laugh.

 

But... what f***ing winds me up about books... 

This is already the best sentence I've ever heard. 

...is, like... my missus will come in with a book and it will be titled - and there's a lot of these, you can substitute any word, it's like a Rubik's Cube of shit titles - it'll be entitled The Incontinence Of Elephants. And I'll say "What's that book about?" And she'll say, "Oh it's about a girl and this load of f***ing nutters..." Right... so it's not about elephants, then? Why the f*** is it called The Incontinence Of Elephants? Another one: The Tales Of The Clumsy Beekeeper. What's that about? "Oh it's about the French Revolution." Right, f*** off. If you're writing a book about a child who's locked in a f***ing cupboard during the f***ing Second World War... he's never seen an elephant. Never mind a f***ing giraffe.

Quite.

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?

His master's tone of voice

This recent Marketing Week post on corporate tone of voice caught my eye. This figure is particularly striking — "brands [globally] spend $13bn (£8.7bn) a year on visual identity and just $2bn on verbal identity" — but it's encouraging to read of brands like O2 and Nationwide taking the war on jargon more seriously (especially as I'm a customer of both).

I wouldn't say O2's 'be more dog' billboards tell us anything useful about the clarity of the company's communications, though: the test is how easily customers can read small print and speak to call centres, not what they take from an abstract ad campaign. Attending to those small details might not win many headlines or awards, but it will help a brand quietly build a good reputation. Equally, we shouldn't assume that because a company's outlook is irreverent and unfussy it necessarily produces clear, consistent messages or makes the most effective use of communication channels. Corporate mission statements that read like Facebook status updates tend to grate.

A common complaint is that the language organisations use is often shaped by backroom technicians rather than frontline communicators, who end up having to work as translators so the public can understand what their colleagues are on about. If it's not possible to involve sales and marketing staff in the terminology process from the start of a project, it can at least help to have a comprehensive style guide that acts as a jargon-to-plain English dictionary.

This is all particularly true on social media. Corporate communicators are nowadays encouraged to speak to customers in their own language online; this is sensible, but it requires a solid grasp of who those customers are and what their language is like. As with every other aspect of the internet, risks and potential rewards are both magnified.

A final related point is that marketing folk tend to be more aware of the need to avoid jargon than senior management, who often need to be persuaded of the value of both plain English and social media. The best managers are instinctively open to such developments, won't treat them as tick-box exercises and will both invest and take part in relevant training: but this is more proof that good external communication depends on good internal communication.

Brands that aren't aware of these issues often end up annoying the public and losing customers. Now, why not have a look at a fellow comms guru's advice on a few things firms can do to avoid annoying journalists and losing press coverage?

What a tangled website we weave

I've written favourably about the new gov.uk site before, and this week I see they've also published their style guide and content guidelines.

For comparison, here's the house style and plain English guide I helped write for my present employers. The Economist, Guardian and BBC style guides are also useful reference points, particularly for anyone coming in to an organisation that hasn't yet developed its own rules.

This latest addition is an impressive bit of work: most of it accords with what we're already doing in our publications, and while there a few points I would quibble with (they advise against writing out numbers below 10, for instance) there are certainly a few more we could incorporate (eg on SEO).

It would be nice to see this applied consistently across the whole public sector and its sub-guides; gov.uk could act as a sort of BSI for these (though I'm not sure what my pals at Hansard would make of that). If David Cameron's looking for a house style tsar, I hereby throw my hat into the ring.

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!

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.