Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style

Writing guides tend to be pretty unsatisfying. They offer plenty of concrete rules, but why, a reader might ask, should the rules be followed? The answer is usually “because” — as in, “because I say so.” This, of course, is where humanity found itself before the advent of the scientific method: the mystics spoke, and everyone had to decide for themselves whom to believe. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker takes a different approach, one that is both more ambitious and more modest. In his new book, “,” he draws on research, and particularly his deep knowledge of linguistics, to give his writing principles a scientific basis. Readers can thus have some assurance that Pinker’s advice is good, and, knowing the reasons why, they will be more likely to know when a rule should be broken. Yet he does not push this method beyond its natural limits. Scientists, after all, still know relatively little about the ways dark squiggles communicate ideas. Instead, he shows readers how to take apart a piece of fine writing to see what makes it tick. He does this with affection and enthusiasm. In Pinker’s hands, we do not feel ordered around capriciously, but truly guided by an inspiring teacher. He was interviewed by Gareth Cook, the editor of Mind Matters.

There are many, many books about writing in the world. What did you hope to add?

That’s fascinating. Can you give any examples of writing lessons that come from cognitive science research?

The authors of traditional style guides, like Strunk and White, were dimly aware of the problem, but lacked the technical concepts to analyze it, and offered useless advice such as “Keep related words together.” The advice is useless for the Yale sentence, the related words and in fact are already together; disambiguating it requires moving related words to get For that matter, if it had been then the word-moving solution would make things worse: is just as misleading as the panel on sex with four professors.

Psycholinguists call these temporary ambiguities “garden paths,” and have run hundreds of experiments on what causes them and what prevents them. In the Yale example, the problem is that the human sentence understanding process parses sentences with the help of statistically frequent word pairs that have a standard structure and meaning—in this case, ,and A careful writer has to scan for them and recast the sentence to avoid the ambiguity. The advice is better stated as “pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart.”

It seems that it is pretty standard, in books about writing style, to bemoan the decline of the written word. Yet you don’t. Why?

You write of “directing the gaze of the reader to something in the world she can see for herself.” Can you explain what you mean by this and how it defines your view of good writing?

Did working on this book change how you approach your own writing in any ways?

I really enjoyed the way the book examines examples of good writing, and then explains what makes them good. Why did you decide to do that?