Steven Pinker’s 'Sense of Style'

People pay me to do it — I’m a freelance editor — but I definitely have days when I wish it were less of a slog to transform unwieldy blocks of text studded with randomly placed commas into smooth, readable prose. “It’s not that hard, people,” I sometimes mutter through gritted teeth — though obviously some find it so.

The standard book recommended to writers who want to improve their prose has been, for the last half century plus, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, a slender volume with a huge, passionate following. It also has numerous detractors, who point out that neither Strunk nor White was actually a grammarian, and that therefore much of the manual’s grammatical advice is, well, wrong. (My review of Stylized, an encomium by one of its acolytes.)

A worthy replacement

Finally there’s a worthy replacement: Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Pinker is a cognitive scientist who’s written some fascinating books, such as The Language Instinct, on the evolution and acquisition of language. He is also the chair of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel, perhaps the most prestigious arbiter of what is and isn’t acceptable in formal written American English.

The AHD panel has been infamous since its founding in 1969 for its consideration of how people actually use language rather than upholding some kind of eternal standards of “correct” grammar. As such, the panelists are considered descriptivists, loosey-goosey “anything goes” types at war with the stickling prescriptivists who man the barricades against plummeting literacy standards.

Pinker is no loosey-goosey fellow — he advocates mastery of what he calls (following literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner) the classic style. “Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius,” he writes. “Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.”

One can master the classic style, Pinker says, by understanding the underlying structure of English grammar rather than by mindlessly following rules that may or may not apply in a particular situation. (He devotes his last chapter, “Telling Right From Wrong,” to a consideration of some of the “may or may not” situations that can trip people up, including “can” vs. “may,” along with vaguely recalled bugaboos like split infinitives.)

Hitting the sweet spot

He comes down, again and again, on the side of common sense. There’s a sweet spot between the “This is what people actually say” approach of the descriptivists and the “This is what people should say” approach of the prescriptivists. There are exceptions to all of the prescriptivist rules, he points out, and most of them are about choosing what sounds right and avoiding the pitfall of hypercorrection.

Actually, Pinker argues, “There is no such thing as a ‘language war’ between Prescriptivists and Descriptivists. The alleged controversy is as bogus as other catchy dichotomies as nature versus nurture and America: Love It or Leave It.” There is no such thing as an “objective” grammatical truth, as is assumed by the prescriptivists. Instead, the point of grammar is to make sure that the writer’s (or speaker’s) meaning is communicated, and the best way to do that is through using the grammatical forms currently in use among competent writers of English.

Most importantly, Pinker recognizes that clarity is only half of mastering good prose — the other half is to have something worth saying. “If you try to repair an incoherent text and find that no placement of therefores and moreovers will hold it together, that is a sign that the underlying argument may be incoherent, too,” he writes.

Amen, brother.