38 pages • 1 hour read
Steven PinkerThe Sense of Style
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPrologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Steven Pinker opens with a declaration of love for style manuals, which he finds both useful and enjoyable to read—especially as a cognitive scientist interested in how language works. He cites William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style as a classic in the genre, but notes that the authors’ keen sense of style was combined with an imperfect grasp of grammar. Moreover, like many other style guides, Elements gave advice that contradicted linguistic science and treated language as unchanging. As a result, Pinker notes, the advice of even the most engaging style manuals can be needlessly restrictive. A fear of change leads some style guide writers to reject new words or embrace the notion that the language is being degraded by the younger generation. Yet, as Pinker demonstrates, that concern has been constant throughout much of written history, and many of the changes deplored by earlier writers are deemed unexceptionable by their later counterparts.
Pinker’s ambition is not to completely replace previous style guides, but to offer reflections on those manuals based on his knowledge of linguistics and cognitive science. He is less interested in setting forth his own list of rules than in examining the logic behind them. The Sense of Style will not address the minutiae of punctuation and grammar rules, Pinker writes, but will focus on what makes writing clear and enjoyable to read. At the end of the prologue, Pinker offers three reasons that good style matters: it increases clarity and understanding, builds trust between the writer and reader, and adds pleasure to the world.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Good Writing”
Good writers, Pinker argues, are first good readers. In Chapter 1 he demonstrates how writers develop an “ear” for style and prose through close readings of passages by Richard Dawkins, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Margalit Fox, and Isabel Wilkerson. These readings aim to uncover what makes each of the passages “good”—carefully chosen diction, a judicious use of parallelism and complexity, visually vivid language, and a commitment to avoiding clichés in favor of specificity. Pinker does not use these readings to derive fixed rules for good writing; rather, he demonstrates the different ways that compelling prose can work. Ultimately, he observes, the authors he admires are passionate about their subjects and eager to communicate with others.
Chapter 2 Summary: “A Window onto the World”
Pinker opens Chapter 2 with the reflection that speaking has long been understood as instinctive, while writing remains for most people “a lifelong challenge even after the mechanics have been mastered” (27). Part of that challenge lies in the fact that, while people instinctively respond to others verbally when they are face to face, writing requires an imagined conversation between writer and reader.
To explore what one particularly effective version of that conversation looks like, Pinker borrows the term “classic style” from the literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner. Classic style, according to Thomas and Turner, aims for transparency, directing the metaphorical gaze of the reader to what the writer deems important. The reader of classic prose puts their effort into appreciating and unpacking the author’s ideas, not in untangling wordy and jargon-laden prose.
Pinker admires the way classic style uses accessible descriptions to make abstract concepts. To illustrate this point, Pinker contrasts passages from astrophysicist Brian Greene and literary theorist Judith Butler. Greene’s lucid explication of theories of multiple universes is, for Pinker, a triumph of classic style. Butler’s academic prose, on the other hand, uses impenetrable, lengthy sentences to say very little.
After analyzing these two passages, Pinker introduces the concept of metadiscourse, or, “verbiage about verbiage” (38). Such language is, Pinker writes, usually tedious and unnecessary, yet is often overused by inexperienced writers. “Signposting,” or telling the reader what they have learned and what to expect next, is more necessary in speeches and presentations, and is a particularly common form of metadiscourse. Yet, Pinker points out, it quickly becomes redundant in written texts where readers can simply review what they have already read. Needless definitions, introductions, obvious metaphors, and the use of “scare quotes” to set off common idioms are also forms of metadiscourse that risk boring readers. Moreover, Pinker observes that hedging words such as “almost,” “seemingly,” and “fairly,” often impede understanding and should be used sparingly in classic style.
Pinker elaborates on the way classic style deploys concrete language to explain abstract concepts. Referring to active people or forces is more concrete than referring to “metaconcepts” such as a framework, model, strategy, or condition. Pinker argues that nominalization, or changing verbs into nouns by adding suffixes such as “ance” or “ation,” can obscure the meaning of a text by making it less active with what scholar Helen Sword calls “zombie nouns” (50). Nominalization has some uses but should not be needlessly overused. The author suggests that using words like “I” or “we” can be helpful, especially if it enhances clarity and establishes the conversational tone of classic style.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
Pinker’s Prologue quickly establishes his conversational, though authoritative, tone. From the beginning, he uses the techniques of classic style by avoiding excessive signposting and using language appropriate for a general audience. Indeed, by the time Pinker explicitly introduces the concept of classic style in Chapter 2, the preceding pages have already made the case for its usefulness. As he will do throughout the book, Pinker draws on a variety of evidence and examples to illustrate his ideas in these early chapters. For instance, when Pinker debunks linguistic purists’ fears of cultural degradation in the preface, he provides a list of similar concerns that date back to the 1400s. He offers little commentary on the individual excerpts, leaving it to the reader to observe the uncanny similarities among them. To emphasize the point, Pinker includes a cartoon that makes the same argument in a humorous and memorable way. These techniques enable Pinker to establish his argument that language change is a fact of life, without turning it into an explicit polemic or denigrating those who disagree with him.
In later sections, as in Chapter 2’s discussion of the pitfalls of metadiscourse, Pinker uses side-by-side comparisons of ineffective and effective prose to illustrate his commentary, and provides copious short examples of whatever phenomenon he is discussing. As with the Prologue’s discussion of the “moral panic” about language change, these techniques follow the dictates of classic prose in guiding a reader’s attention toward the underlying argument.
Longer quoted passages allow Pinker to systematically unfold and comment upon the techniques of other writers. In Chapter 1, for instance, he praises Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction study The Warmth of Other Suns for its ability to humanize individual actors in the historical event of the “Great Migration,” the period between 1910 and 1970 when millions of Black Americans left the South to move to other regions of the United States. Pinker demonstrates how Wilkerson avoids the generalizing language of historical and social forces with inventive prose, visual details, and imagery that envision her subjects as individuals with relatable fears and ambitions.
In these chapters, Pinker establishes his theme of The Writer-Reader Relationship, noting that classic writers treat their readers as equals, and write in a style that makes their reader feel “like a genius” (36). He develops this theme by making concrete suggestions on how writers can establish this egalitarian dynamic between themselves and their reader. For example, he suggests making references to “we” and “us,” as if the writer and reader were on a journey together. His advice on avoiding needless jargon and complex prose also helps writers remember that this may make their writing inaccessible to many readers they hope to reach. At the same time, his conversational style and range of references to popular culture reinforce the lessons of classic style; ideally, that is, the reader of The Sense of Style will also feel like a genius.
Pinker’s exploration of The Writer-Reader Relationship ties in with the theme of The Reader’s Experience. While many style guides focus—understandably—on what a writer needs to know and do, Pinker argues that more attention should be paid to how a reader experiences or might experience a text. To bolster the authority of this claim, Pinker draws on his expertise in cognitive science, specifically studies of how people read and remember information:
Writing is an unnatural act. […] The spoken word is older than our species, and the instinct for language allows children to engage in articulate conversation years before they enter a schoolhouse. But the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond (27).
Readers, according to one study, find writing with “varied vocabulary” more engaging. His discussion of how readers process information offers insight into why certain advice from traditional style manuals makes sense, while also making clear the need for nuance in practice. While concrete language and active voice are certainly effective and necessary in many cases, the much-demonized passive voice also has its use—a point that Pinker makes by considering the tone of warning labels on generators and by a series of examples of how subtle shifts in emphasis have the effect of guiding a reader’s experience.
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