Keep reading... or not? Steven Pinker

This is the 107th episode in a series usually carrying a Dutch title: Doorlezen of niet? The concept of the series: I read the first 50 pages of a new book – any kind of book – and based on my reading experience I decide whether or not I’ll keep on reading. Since today’s book is about (among other things) the English language, I might as well write this episode in English. 

Today: The sense of style. The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane/Penguin Books). 

Who? Steven Pinker (1954) is an American linguist, cognitive scientist and public intellectual. I associate him most with his book The better angels of our nature (2011), in which he argued that the amount of violence in the world has steadily declined throughout history. He wrote several other bestselling popular science books, such as The language instinct (1994) and How the mind works (1997).

Buzz? Mixed reviews in the English press. No Dutch translation on the horizon, as far as I can see. 

Prejudice of the day? Leafing through this book in the store, I noticed an imposing number of diagrams. 

What was that you asked? What ís this book, precisely? A style guide, or a humorous tome on the pitfalls of writing? 

The first fifty pages... In his prologue, Mr Pinker confesses to a love of style guides, because ‘I am a psycholinguist and a cognitive scientist, and what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind?’ However, he says, a lot of these style guides treat language as if it never evolves. Evolution in language is not a bad thing, he argues, and people don’t write worse today than fifty years, ore or two centuries ago: 

contrary to urban legend, they [this is, college students today] do not sprinkle their papers with smileys and instant-messaging abbreviations like IMHO and L8TR, any more than previous generations forgot how to use prepositions and articles out of the habit of omitting them from their telegrams.

In short, Pinker’s aim is not to fight off the barbarians. His book is simply ‘designed for people who know how to write and want to write better.’ Well, count me in. 

The first few chapters are dedicated to what I would call ‘writing attitude’. Writing, Pinker says, is a window on the world. A writer should always show: ‘The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself.’ With this in mind, it becomes obvious you shouldn’t write about issues, concepts, processes and the like: 

Could you recognize a “level” or a “perspective” if you met one in the street? Could you point it out to someone else?

Concrete objects and people are what clear writing is about. A sentence in Academese like ‘Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria’ comes (somewhat) to life if you make it concrete: ‘We excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.’ 

Read how? With admiration for Pinker’s optimism and passion. 

In the first chapter, ‘Good writing’, Pinker doesn’t dispense any advice at all, but analyses a few paragraphs of what he considers to be good writing. Admittedly, quoting your own wife has a high ew-factor. Nevertheless I loved this chapter, because it is very rare for a chunk of prose to be analysed in this much detail. As a reviewer, you simply don’t get the time or space to explain why specific prose functions, what makes it great. (Most of the time, a writer’s style gets brushed off with one or two adjectives and no argumentation whatsoever.) 

Pinker’s book reminded me of the equally enjoyable Reading like a writer by Francine Prose – formally a writer’s guide, but mostly recommendable for taking bits of literary prose and showing how and why they work so well. 

Both Pinker and Prose manage to voice their passion about language c.q. literature. Pinker, moreover, is hilarious. The broad advice he dishes out may not always be surprising, he manages to “rehash” with conviction, tons of original examples and some cartoons to boot, like my all-time favourite Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. Pinker, relentlessly optimistic, doesn’t agree with Calvin, by the way. He does not buy into the idea that people write illegibly on purpose, writing gibberish to ‘cover their anatomy’. Instead, he uses research in psychology to explain ‘the curse of knowledge’: the honest-to-god problem of guessing how much your audience already knows about your topic. 

By the time the chapter with the diagrams came up, Steven Pinker had wound me around his little finger. 

Keep reading? I cancelled a date to keep reading in Mr Pinker’s book, so yeah, this one’s a keeper.