The Sense of Style

Pinker uses many of the same techniques in Chapters 3 and 4 that he does in the earlier sections. He continues to punctuate conceptual points and recommendations with compelling examples and humorous cartoons. To highlight the negative impact of poor writing, Pinker provides anecdotes about both the everyday annoyances and dramatic historical disasters caused by bad writing. Escalating consequences from the minor inconvenience of trying to figure out how to work an unfamiliar gadget to a literal nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island helps Pinker emphasize the logistical necessity of strong, clear communication.

By locating the cause of confusing writing in “the curse of knowledge,” however, Pinker avoids making a moral or intellectual judgment on those who produce it. Indeed, he characterizes the curse of knowledge as “the single best explanation […] of why good people write bad prose” (61). Curses, even those of “egocentrism,” can be lifted or exorcised—they are not, in other words, a reflection of the cursed individual’s personality or abilities. Thus, even as he lays out the numerous—and the nuclear—consequences of poor communication, Pinker maintains a sympathetic, even gently humorous, relationship to his intended reader. He does not want to pressure them into compliance, as he sees so many style mavens and grammar teachers doing; rather—as an adherent of the classic style discussed in earlier chapters—he wants to guide them into clearer thinking.

This does not mean that breaking a curse is easy. In fact, Pinker writes, “Like a drunk who is too impaired to realize he is too impaired to drive, we do not notice the curse because the curse prevents us from noticing it. This blindness impairs us in every act of communication” (61). Just as “egocentrism” prevents young children from imagining what something physically looks like from another perspective, and “false consensus” prompts people to believe that others would make the same decision as them, the curse of knowledge risks misrepresenting reality and distorting everyday life. Pinker refers to a study on cell phone users that showed that experienced users greatly underestimated the time it would take a novice user to learn how to use the phone, showing that it was difficult for them to imagine how it would feel to not be as knowledgeable as they were.

Pinker uses hyperbole to emphasize the cumulative consequences of the curse of knowledge: “Multiply these daily frustrations by a few billion, and you begin to see that the curse of knowledge is a pervasive drag on the strivings of humanity, on a par with corruption, disease, and entropy” (62). Whatever its merit as an explanation for the ills of the world, Pinker’s vivid, humorously inflated language communicates the real importance of counteracting poor writing.

Pinker’s argument about the curse of knowledge connects to his theme of The Reader’s Experience; he invites writers to consider how readers suffer the consequences of the confusing prose produced by unclear writing. When writers use jargon and technical terms they instantly make their writing inaccessible to many readers who would otherwise easily understand their arguments. Pinker also indicates that participating in a literal version of The Writer-Reader Relationship can help writers to improve their prose. Sharing drafts with others in order to gauge their response reinforces a writer’s orientation toward their readers more generally This advice also further echoes Pinker’s argument that writers should be self-aware, empathetic, and willing to consider feedback in order to better imagine their own work from their readers’ perspective. After all, he writes, “Only when we ask those people do we discover that what’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to them” (75). Without these insights, Pinker argues, the reader will not derive the meaning that the writer intended.

In Chapter 4, which focuses on grammar, Pinker supplements his written argument with diagrams of the webs, strings, and trees that structure his approach to grammar. Like the close readings in Chapter 1, these diagrams provide a step-by-step illustration of grammatical concepts, making abstract ideas visually clear and demonstrating how grammar functions in a variety of circumstances. This hybrid, example-driven strategy enables Pinker to support his view that grammar is “one of the extraordinary adaptations in the living world: our species’ solution to the problem of getting complicated thoughts from one head into another” (79); he goes on to liken it to an “app.” This enthusiasm, articulated early in Chapter 4, reframes grammar as an active force rather than a set of abstract rules to be memorized—a view that will be expanded in Pinker’s take on the “style guide” that comprises most of Chapter 6.