MEET THE AUTHOR
Steven Pinker will discuss his new book, "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century," 8-10 p.m. Oct. 16. $30 with book; $10 without book; at the Savannah College of Art and Design's SCADshow (previously the Academy Theatre), 173 14th St., Atlanta. 404-253-2740, scadshow.com/.
Cognitive scientist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker, author of “The Language Instinct” and “The Blank Slate,” has written extensively about the acquisition of language.
His newest book, “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century” (Viking Adult, $27.95), observes the way we frequently deploy this language on paper (or online), and judges it to be abysmal.
Pinker, who will discuss writing and style Oct. 16 at the Savannah College of Art and Design, says that professionals in particular (and Pinker singles out his fellow academics as among the worst offenders) are often unreadable, freighting their sentences with jargon and qualifiers out the wazoo.
Is it because they have nothing to say? Are they trying to dress up their thoughts to look fancy? Not necessarily. In general, writes Pinker, it’s “the curse of knowledge”: an inability to imagine a reader not knowing what the writer knows.
Unlike other purse-lipped style guides that demand rote allegiance to a Puritan code (Never use the passive voice! Never end a sentence with a preposition!), Pinker’s book stresses clarity, understanding and, above all, style.
He recently answered a few questions about writing guides:
Q: Isn’t it impossible to learn how to write well by following a writing guide?
A: I hope it's not completely impossible, or I would have wasted a lot of time writing this one.
Q: Can understanding the structure of the brain make you a better writer?
A: I don't think it's the structure of the brain (so much) as it is the function of the mind. Foremost is understanding what a sentence is doing: It is taking a convoluted web of ideas and transferring it into a linear string of words. … That word order has to do two things at once: convey who did what to whom, and convey ideas in a systematic order.
Q: Why are we still teaching high school students to write unwieldy paragraphs with topic sentences and conclusions?
A: It's always tempting to have a formula with which we should teach complicated subject matter. There are dozens of considerations to trade off when composing a sentence, and if some of the decisions are legislated from the beginning, it makes it easier for writing students to learn and writing teachers to teach. But rather than simplifying the way prose is written, it is more often boring and formulaic.
Q: Is our writing getting worse?
A: I don't see any evidence of that, and there's good reason to be skeptical of any claim that things were better in the good old days. People always make that claim, but it's seldom backed up by real data. I know of one study that looks at the quality of students' term papers over decades, and there was no increase in grammatical or spelling errors, but they found an increase in the sheer amount of writing a student does. … Just a couple of decades ago, the major complaint about young people was that they were watching too much TV, listening to too much music on the radio, spending too much time on the phone. … Now the phone company is worried that people aren't making as many phone calls as they used to. (There are alternatives to phone calls) and those alternatives are text-based.
About the Author
