Style and Writing in the 21st Century

Posted by Pierre-Edouard Guerin · 10 min read · Published on April 2, 2020

I watched Steven Pinker’s talk on YouTube about writing style in the 21st century, and it was brilliant. Does writing well matter in an age of instant communication? According to Pinker, yes it does, but we must minimize the flaws of the post-modern style. Writing has never been natural for humans. Some difficulties are as old as writting itself, some are new, and some have only recently been revealed thanks to cognitive science and linguistics. Here, I have summarized the advices from Pinker on how to write in a better style.

Why is so much writing so bad?

Why do we have to struggle with so much legalese?

"The revocation by these Regulations of a provision previously revoked subject to savings does not affect the continued operations."

With so much academese?

"It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness of its fall into conceptuality."

Why is it so hard to set the time on a digital alarm clock?

dubowski comics more gibberish

As captured in this cartoon from Mark Dubowski, a first theory could be that bad writing is a deliberate choice. Perhaps this is the way bureaucrats choose to retaliate against society. This may be true that some writers are banboozling their readers some of the time. But it doesn't ring true. Because good scientist can also write bad prose.
A second theory is that digital media stupifies the new generation. Writting was better in previous times. Actually, complains about the immediate decline of our language can be found in every area:
- Mass media age
  
  "Recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all."
  
  Joseph Mersand, writer, 1961
- Telegraph age
  
  "Our freshmen can't spell, can't puncutate. Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments."
  
  Charles Henshaw Ward, teacher, 1917
- Modern age
  
  "Our language is degenerating very fast... I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it."
  
  James Beattie, poet and philosophy professor, 1785
- Pharaoh age (according to this cartoon from Wiley Ink)
Last theory according to Charles Darwin is that every man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write. Speaking is instinctive whereas writting is hard.

The Problem with Traditional Style Advice

As writting is the result of a work, we should follow rules from style advice book for instance The Element of Style from Elwyn Brooks White (yes the author of the infamous Stuart Little). However such advices are useless to write in the style of the 21st century:

Arbitrary list of dos and don'ts based on the tastes and peeves of the authors
No principled understanding of how language works

Why we can write in a better Style in the 21st Century

In the 21st century, the style advices are based on science:

Language structure theory: Grammar is not a set of arbitrary rules inherited from Latin language. It is a natural organization of the words we speak, and thefore it can be described.
Evidence-based dictionaries: Unlike prescriptive dictionaries that may impose incorrect or outdated usages.
Cognitive science: What makes sentences easy or hard to read.

Classic Style

In Academia, the good writting style is the classic style:

Prose as a window onto the world
- The writer has seen something in the world.
- He positions the reader so she can see it with her own eyes.
The reader and writer are equals
The goal is to help the reader see objective reality
The style is conversation

What are Non-Classic Styles?

Classic style is just one of a variety of styles. They are many: contemplative, oracular, practical, etc. However, they are one style that infects most academic prose, they called it the post-modern style or ego style:

The writer is concerned about seeming naive to the reader.

Naive means without knowledge or experience. For instance when you open a recipe cookbook, as a reader, you put aside some existential questions like Do eggs really exist?, What is cooking and why do we cook?, Is food something knowledgeable?, etc. In a cookbook, such questions are inappropriate, and the classic style ignores them. The purpose is to treat exclusively the subject, the recipe in the case of a cookbook.

Classic vs. Post-Modern Prose

The focus is on the thing being shown not on the activity of studying it.

Post-Modern

"In recent years, an increasing number of researchers have turned their attention to the problem of child language acquisition. In this article, recent theories of this process will be reviewed."
Classic

"All children acquire the ability to speak without explicit lessons. How do they accomplish this feat?"

Minimize Apology

"The problem of language acquisition is extremely complex. It is difficult to give precise definitions of the concept of language and the concept of acquisition and the concept of children. There is much uncertainty about the interpretation of experimental data and a great deal of controversy surrounding the theories. More research needs to be done."

You can delete this lengthy verbiage with no loss in content.
The reader already know that many concepts are hard to define
The reader is there to see what the writer will do about it

Minimize hedging

literally, somewhat, fairly, rather, nearly, relatively, seemingly, comparatively, apparently, etc.
Sudder quotes ""
- She is a "quick study" and has been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her

The compulsive hedging is a manner to cover our words so we can stay ambiguous e.g She virtually loved it..

Take the risk to be clear and possibly wrong than muddy and not even wrong.
Not everything has to be stated with absolute precision.

Minimize Clichés

Each time you use a cliché, the reader shutdowns their imagination
Avoid clichés like the plague:

"We needed to think outside the box in our search for the holy grail, but found that it was neither a magic bullet, so we rolled with the punches and let the chips fall where they may while seeing the glass as half-full. It's a no-brainer!"

Minimize Meta

Write about the world not about how you write about it.
Avoid metaconcepts i.e concepts about concepts: approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, paradigm, perspective, process, role, strategy, tendency, variable, etc.

Minimize Zombie Nouns

Nominalization is turning a verb into a noun. Instead of appearing you make an appearance.
Bad usage examples:
- In academia:
  - 🧟 "Subjects were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation."
  - ✅ "We tested the students in a quiet room."
- In politics:
  - 🧟 "The President is desirous of trying to see how we can make our best efforts in order to find a way to facilitate."
  - ✅ "The President wants to help."
- In engineering:
  - 🧟 "Mild exposure to CO can result in accumulated damage over time. Extreme exposure to CO may rapidly be fatal without producing significant warning symptoms."
  - ✅ "Using a generator indoors CAN KILL YOU IN MINUTES."

Minimize the Passive Form

Passive form like nominalization contributes to turn your prose into zombie prose. However the passive form could not have survived for 1500 years if it did not serve some purpose. So how to prevent people to overuse it?

Present yourself the language like an application for converting a web of thoughts into a string of words.

For instance the play Oedipus of Sophocles is composed of:

Subjects: Oedipus, Jocasta, Laius
Actions: is, kill, marry
Functions: father, mother, wife, husband, son

The summary of Oedipus is: "Oedipus married his mother and killed his father."

Here the summary is incoherent. Why? Because a sentence is a string of words and in the english language the order of words matters.

Words oder is used as a code for meaning who did what to whom
Is also the order in which the bits of information are absorbed by the reader
- The material at the beginning of the sentence are information required to understand what will happen.
- The material at the end of the sentence are what the reader should now notice.

Any prose that violates this principles will be incoherent. Hopefully, English syntax provides writers with constructions such as passive form to vary the order of words while preserving meaning:

Oedipus killed Laius
Laius was killed by Oedipus
It was Laius whom Oedipus killed
It was Oedipus who killed Laius

Writers must choose the construction that introduces information to the reader in the order in which she can absorb them.

Minimize semantic distinction

In general, one should avoid reaching for a hoity-toity word to replace a humber synonym.

fulsome is not equivalent to full
simplistic is not equivalent to simple
complex is not equivalent to complicated

Minimize correct usage

Correct usage should be kept in perspective:

The least important part of good writting
far less important than
- classic style
- coherent ordering of ideas
- overcoming the curse of knowledge
- argumentation
Tacit, evolving conventions

Sense vs. Usage

Sense: the meaning of a word, as defined in the dictionary.
Usage: how a word is used by people depending on the context.

Sense and usage don’t always match. A word’s meaning may be twisted by its common usage. Example: a review originally referred to a military inspection. Common usage has shifted it to mean a journal.

The Curse of Knowledge

Does not occur to the writer that readers...

have learned their jargon
do know the intermediate steps that seem too obvious to mention
can visualize a scene currently in the writer's mind's eye

And so the writer does not bother to...

explain the jargon
spell out the logic
supply the concrete details

How to overcome the curse?

Get a flesh and blood person to read your writting. It can be your mother or yourself several days later.
Allow your reader to form a mental image based on what you're writting.
- An idea is not a string of words, the mind must grasp it
- Use concrete examples
- Use visual metaphors and symboles instead of abstract terms

Conclusion

Modern linguistic and cognitive science provide better ways of enhancing our writing. A model of prose communication, the classic style in which language is a window on the world. We better understand how language works as a way of converting a web of thoughts into a string of words. The main reason writing remains difficult, however, is the curse of knowledge. A challenge every writer must recognize and overcome.

To go further

Steven Pinker is a linguist, Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

References

The Royal Institution Talk film: Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century with Steven Pinker

The Sense of Style

Steven Pinker

The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-0143127796

Politics and the English Language

George Orwell

An essay, 1947. ISBN-13: 978-0141393063

The Elements of Style

Elwyn Brooks White and William Strunk Jr.

The English writting style manual, 1918. ISBN-13: 978-0205309023

Published on April 2, 2020

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About the Author

Pierre-Edouard Guerin

Bioinformatician