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.
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Background
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Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
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The Reader’s Experience
In The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker develops the theme of the reader’s experience, pointing to numerous studies that reveal how readers take in new information and make meaning and memories from what they have read. Pinker explores how reading requires different kinds of mental effort, advising writers to embrace strategies that minimize the effort to understand their prose, so the reader can more easily understand their ideas.
With every word, the writer makes “cognitive demands” on a reader:
As the reader works through a sentence, plucking off a word at a time, she is not just threading it onto a mental string of beads. She is also growing branches of a tree upward. […] So every time a writer adds a word to a sentence, he is imposing not one but two cognitive demands on the reader: understanding the word, and fitting it into the tree (104).
Pinker notes that this scientific insight supports the traditional advice to writers to “[o]mit needless words,” since superfluous words further burden readers without providing any additional meaning (104).
Pinker points to mental effort to explain other conventions. He observes that confusing negations require readers to attach a “mental tag” to false statements in an effort to remember them. For example, remembering a negative like “The king is not dead” is more mentally taxing on a reader than remembering the positive version “The king is alive” (172). Thus, he advises writers to use positive constructions when possible. Overusing jargon and technical terms that readers have to stop to look up is another example of imposing an unnecessary mental effort on one’s readers. Pinker advises writers to remember that their readers “may not be members of the clubhouse,” so writers should explain technical terms and use ones that are the most obvious and memorable (63). In order to consistently apply these insights in their work, writers must imagine their text from their reader’s point of view. Pinker argues that a writer’s ability to do this will help them to produce work that is clear, coherent, and engaging for their audience.
The Importance of Clarity in Writing
Pinker delineates the main features of strong writing, from the overarching structure to diction and punctuation, emphasizing that all these considerations, from the macro to the micro, are ultimately about clarity. Pinker dedicates a great deal of discussion to the importance of organization in writing, emphasizing that even if the minutiae of a writer’s prose is clear, it will be meaningless to the reader if it is not coherently organized into the writer’s broader argument. By including examples of passages with no topic sentences, Pinker demonstrates that it is possible to write numerous logical sentences on a certain topic that are still totally incoherent. By performing these interactive experiments with the reader, Pinker emphasizes the importance of explicit organization in a text, and the inclusion of titles, topic sentences, and other clarifying phrasing.
Once a writer has a good grasp on how to structure their work, they can focus on the prose of each sentence. Pinker suggests avoiding negations and embracing active subjects and verbs to create clear, understandable sentences. This helps writers to maintain their readers’ interest, and relieves the reader of needing to backtrack and reread sections of the text to understand or remember it. Pinker also points to certain stylistic conventions in English that are known for creating appealing prose. Writers should generally list words and phrases in the order of “light before heavy,” as in the Scottish prayer that asks for protection from “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night” (130). In this example, the first two listed items are only one word each, with the “heaviest” phrase saved for the last part of the sentence. Another pleasing style convention is to discuss information in the order of “given, then new,” always establishing a familiar concept before introducing new information to add to it (131). Pinker reinforces these recommendations with scientific findings:
[P]eople learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. […] Topic-then-comment and given-then-new orderings are major contributors to coherence, the feeling that one sentence flows into the next rather than jerking the reader around (128).
In this, as in many other passages, Pinker’s own prose displays the features of strong writing that he praises in others.
Indeed, Pinker demonstrates how vivid images elucidate abstract concepts. Pinker lists several engaging examples of similes from non-fiction works:
A psychologist explains a computer simulation in which activation builds up in a neuron until it fires ‘like popcorn in a pan.’ An editor looking to sign up new talent writes about attending a funeral at which ‘the concentration of authors was so dense, I felt like an Alaskan grizzly at the foot of a waterfall, poised to pull out salmon by the paw-ful’ (48).
Pinker’s thorough dissection of the myriad ingredients of good writing provides writers with guidance on every level of the writing process, from planning to prose.
The Writer-Reader Relationship
Throughout The Sense of Style Pinker reflects on the relationship between writer and reader. He acknowledges that this imagined relationship can be difficult for writers to conjure, since they are not really in direct conversation with their readers. However, although writers do not meet their readers or speak directly to them, Pinker claims that writers can still establish a positive, egalitarian relationship with the reader through careful wording, organization, and the overall tone of their work. Ideally, he writes, “The writer and reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation” (29). One way that writers can foster this egalitarian tone is by focusing on clearly presenting truths, and trusting that “the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view” (29). Pinker details the elements that can easily obstruct a reader’s “view,” namely the “curse of knowledge.” He explains, “Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think they do, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don’t, you are guaranteed to confuse them” (63). To overcome this bias, Pinker prescribes a couple remedies: One is to imagine an average reader encountering one’s work and consider their perspective on it. Another is to always explain technical terms and use lay language rather than jargon when possible. The best way to break this curse is for writers to show their drafts to others and solicit their feedback. Indeed, these exchanges present a rare opportunity for writers to have a direct conversation with a reader, who can provide valuable insights into how others may engage with the same text. The conversational tone of The Sense of Style offers an ongoing example of how a reader-writer relationship may be cultivated.
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