I enjoyed
most of Steven Pinker’s, The Sense of
Style – The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
My computer
puts a green wavy line under the second definite article in that title,
apparently because it doesn’t like the capitalisation. Just illustrating that
we can all find something to argue about when deciding how groups of words
should be written. I could object to the inelegance of the occurrence of two definite articles in so few words, and I could wonder at the ambiguity: who is the thinking person, the author or any reader who finds the book a useful guide?
And arguments
can get heated. To deter criticism – rather as Kremlin parades of nuclear
missiles averted Moscow’s annihilation – Pinker ends with five things an antagonist
should do before engaging. The fifth includes this:
“Psychologists have shown that in any dispute both sides are
convinced that they themselves are reasonable and upright and that their
opposite numbers are mulish and dishonest. [Footnoting Haidt, J. 2012. The righteous mind: Why good people are
divided by politics and religion. New York: Pantheon, and Pinker, S. 2011. The better angels of our nature: Why
violence has declined. New York: Viking, chapter 8.]”
Squabbles
about being right or wrong are beside the point. The point is style, not
grammar. And Pinker concludes by saying that the reasons to strive for good
style are:
“to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to
detail, and to add to the beauty of the world.”
And how to
achieve good style? Pinker describes his own writing method, presumably used
for this book: rework every sentence, revise a chapter two or three times
before showing it to anyone, revise again at least twice in response to
feedback, then give the whole book “at least two
complete passes of polishing” before it goes to the copy editor for a
couple more rounds of tweaking.
Good style
doesn’t come easily. And what is the thing that all this revision is trying to
get into the writing? Pinker gives plenty of examples of how writing can be
improved. In the end, however, all that can really be said by way of defining
good style, it seems to me, is that it feels right, and in the case of a revision
it feels better than what went before. And this improvement would be accepted
by most adults who have English as their first language and who appreciate good
writing (the thinking people of his title). Read aloud, to get syntax right so
that readers don’t stumble: “laboratory studies
have shown that even skilled readers have a little voice running through their
heads the whole time.” If it doesn’t sound right it’s not good style.
In one – what
is for me significant – respect I find Pinker’s style repellent. I suspect his
ears (as he says in relation to a different topic) have “been contaminated by a habit ... to avoid spitballs from the Gotcha!
Gang.” It seems to me that his ears have been contaminated in the
academic environment by the requirement, appropriate though it may be during a
developmental stage of young people’s education, to avoid the sexism of using
he to include the female gender, by using he alternately with she, or by using
the phrase he or she, or by using their to refer to a singular of either gender.
I agree that
sexist language should be avoided, but the right way to do it is to revise
until the need for reference to gender disappears. I agree with Antonin Scalia
on this (see my review
of Scalia and Garner, Making Your Case –
The Art of Persuading Judges).
Pinker begins
(according to my Kindle app this is p (iv)) by telling us that he will “avoid the awkwardness of strings of he or she ... [by]
consistently referring to a generic writer of one sex and a generic writer of
another. The male gender ... will represent the writer in this chapter; the
roles will alternate in subsequent ones.” But later (p 260) he refers
again to science: “Experiments that measure readers’
comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that the singular
they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot.”
So generic he
is bad. Presumably generic she is too. So Pinker’s plan was to alternate bad
style chapters with other bad style chapters.
Although he
acknowledges that he or she is clumsy
(p 256), his plan leads Pinker to do worse by alternating male and female
pronouns, even in the one sentence (p 29): “The
writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients
the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself.”
This would
have been better: "The writer can see something that the reader has not yet
noticed, bringing it to the reader’s attention." And even better: "The writer can bring something new to the reader's attention."
And sillier
too is the image one gets of Pinker marking a student’s paper, when he says
that (p 28) a “college student who writes a term
paper is pretending that he knows more about his subject than the reader and
that his goal is to supply the reader with information she needs ...”.
Better would
have been: "a college student who writes a term paper is pretending to know more
about its subject than the reader and that the goal is to supply the reader
with needed information." Even better: "a college student who writes a term paper is pretending to tell the reader something new."
My
suggestions are not perfect, and I’m not calling Pinker mulish, but they point
to directions for further revisions.