to wirte an essay for a reading material

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: GOOD WRITING

Chapter 2: A WINDOW ONTO THE WORLD

Chapter 3: THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

Chapter 4: THE WEB, THE TREE, AND THE STRING

Chapter 5: ARCS OF COHERENCE

Chapter 6: TELLING RIGHT FROM WRONG

Notes

Glossary

References

Acknowledgments

Follow Penguin

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition

The Language Instinct How the Mind Works

Words and Rules The Blank Slate

The Stuff of Thought The Better Angels of Our Nature

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles

EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER

Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols (with Jacques Mehler)

Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (with Beth Levin) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004

To Susan Pinker and Robert Pinker who have a way with words

Prologue

I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It’s not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It’s also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice. William Strunk’s course notes on writing, which his student E. B. White turned into their famous little book, was studded with gems of self-exemplification such as “Write with nouns and verbs,” “Put the emphatic words of a sentence at the end,” and best of all, his prime directive, “Omit needless words.” Many eminent stylists have applied their gifts to explaining the art, including Kingsley Amis, Jacques Barzun, Ambrose Bierce, Bill Bryson, Robert Graves, Tracy Kidder, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, F. L. Lucas, George Orwell, William Safire, and of course White himself, the beloved author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Here is the great essayist reminiscing about his teacher:

In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself—a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and, in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, “Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”1

I like to read style manuals for another reason, the one that sends botanists to the garden and chemists to the kitchen: it’s a practical application of our science. 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? It’s all the more captivating to someone who seeks to explain these fields to a wide readership. I think about how language works so that I can best explain how language works.

But my professional acquaintance with language has led me to read the traditional manuals with a growing sense of unease. Strunk and White, for all their intuitive feel for style, had a tenuous grasp of grammar.2 They misdefined terms such as phrase, participle, and relative clause, and in steering their readers away from passive verbs and toward active transitive ones they botched their examples of both. There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground, for instance, is not in the passive voice, nor does The cock’s crow came with dawn contain a transitive verb. Lacking the tools to analyze language, they often struggled when turning their intuitions into advice, vainly appealing to the writer’s “ear.” And they did not seem to realize that some of the advice contradicted itself: “Many a tame sentence … can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice” uses the passive voice to warn against the passive voice. George Orwell, in his vaunted “Politics and the English Language,” fell into the same trap when, without irony, he derided prose in which “the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active.”3

Self-contradiction aside, we now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions

because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory. A skilled writer should know what those functions are and push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naïve style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.

Style manuals that are innocent of linguistics also are crippled in dealing with the aspect of writing that evokes the most emotion: correct and incorrect usage. Many style manuals treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation. But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore and myth. For many reasons, manuals that are credulous about the inerrancy of the traditional rules don’t serve writers well. Although some of the rules can make prose better, many of them make it worse, and writers are better off flouting them. The rules often mash together issues of grammatical correctness, logical coherence, formal style, and standard dialect, but a skilled writer needs to keep them straight. And the orthodox stylebooks are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

Yet the authors of the classic manuals wrote as if the language they grew up with were immortal, and failed to cultivate an ear for ongoing change. Strunk and White, writing in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, condemned then-new verbs like personalize, finalize, host, chair, and debut, and warned writers never to use fix for “repair” or claim for “declare.” Worse, they justified their peeves with cockamamie rationalizations. The verb contact, they argued, is “vague and self-important. Do not contact people; get in touch with them, look them up, phone them, find them, or meet them.” But of course the vagueness of to contact is exactly why it caught on: sometimes a writer doesn’t need to know how one person will get in touch with another, as long as he does so. Or consider this head-scratcher, concocted to explain why a writer should never use a number word with people, only with persons: “If of ‘six people’ five went away, how many people would be left? Answer: one people.” By the same logic, writers should avoid using numbers with irregular plurals such as men, children, and teeth (“If of ‘six children’ five went away …”).

In the last edition published in his lifetime, White did acknowledge some changes to the language, instigated by “youths” who “speak to other youths in a tongue of their own devising: they renovate the language with a wild vigor, as they would a basement apartment.” White’s condescension to these “youths” (now in their retirement years) led him to predict the passing of nerd, psyched, ripoff, dude, geek, and funky, all of which have become entrenched in the language.

The graybeard sensibilities of the style mavens come not just from an underappreciation of the fact of language change but from a lack of reflection on their own psychology. As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:5

The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar,

syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense. … In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread.—1978

Recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all. They cannot construct a simple declarative sentence, either orally or in writing. They cannot spell common, everyday words. Punctuation is apparently no longer taught. Grammar is a complete mystery to almost all recent graduates.—1961

From every college in the country goes up the cry, “Our freshmen can’t spell, can’t punctuate.” Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.—1917

The vocabularies of the majority of high-school pupils are amazingly small. I always try to use simple English, and yet I have talked to classes when quite a minority of the pupils did not comprehend more than half of what I said.—1889

Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested … there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman.—1833

Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast. … I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it.—1785

Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press. Soon after William Caxton set up the first one in England in 1478, he lamented, “And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.” Indeed, moral panic about the decline of writing may be as old as writing itself:

Non Sequitur © 2011 Wiley Ink, Inc. Dist. by Universal Uclick. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

The cartoon is not much of an exaggeration. According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.6

My discomfort with the classic style manuals has convinced me that we need a writing guide for the twenty-first century. It’s not that I have the desire, to say nothing of the ability, to supplant The Elements of Style. Writers can profit by reading more than one style guide, and much of Strunk and White (as it is commonly called) is as timeless as it is charming. But much of it is not. Strunk was born in 1869, and today’s writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

A manual for the new millennium cannot just perpetuate the diktats of earlier manuals. Today’s

writers are infused by the spirit of scientific skepticism and the ethos of questioning authority. They should not be satisfied with “That’s the way it’s done” or “Because I said so,” and they deserve not to be patronized at any age. They rightly expect reasons for any advice that is foisted upon them.

Today we can provide the reasons. We have an understanding of grammatical phenomena which goes well beyond the traditional taxonomies based on crude analogies with Latin. We have a body of research on the mental dynamics of reading: the waxing and waning of memory load as readers comprehend a passage, the incrementing of their knowledge as they come to grasp its meaning, the blind alleys that can lead them astray. We have a body of history and criticism which can distinguish the rules that enhance clarity, grace, and emotional resonance from those that are based on myths and misunderstandings. By replacing dogma about usage with reason and evidence, I hope not just to avoid giving ham-fisted advice but to make the advice that I do give easier to remember than a list of dos and don’ts. Providing reasons should also allow writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, mindful of what they are designed to accomplish, rather than robotically.

“The sense of style” has a double meaning. The word sense, as in “the sense of sight” and “a sense of humor,” can refer to a faculty of mind, in this case the faculties of comprehension that resonate to a well-crafted sentence. It can also refer to “good sense” as opposed to “nonsense,” in this case the ability to discriminate between the principles that improve the quality of prose and the superstitions, fetishes, shibboleths, and initiation ordeals that have been passed down in the traditions of usage.

The Sense of Style is not a reference manual in which you can find the answer to every question about hyphenation and capitalization. Nor is it a remedial guide for badly educated students who have yet to master the mechanics of a sentence. Like the classic guides, it is designed for people who know how to write and want to write better. This includes students who hope to improve the quality of their papers, aspiring critics and journalists who want to start a blog or column or series of reviews, and professionals who seek a cure for their academese, bureaucratese, corporatese, legalese, medicalese, or officialese. The book is also written for readers who seek no help in writing but are interested in letters and literature and curious about the ways in which the sciences of mind can illuminate how language works at its best.

My focus is on nonfiction, particularly genres that put a premium on clarity and coherence. But unlike the authors of the classic guides, I don’t equate these virtues with plain words, austere expression, and formal style.7 You can write with clarity and with flair, too. And though the emphasis is on nonfiction, the explanations should be useful to fiction writers as well, because many principles of style apply whether the world being written about is real or imaginary. I like to think they might also be helpful to poets, orators, and other creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose to flout them for rhetorical effect.

People often ask me whether anyone today even cares about style. The English language, they say, faces a new threat in the rise of the Internet, with its texting and tweeting, its email and chatrooms. Surely the craft of written expression has declined since the days before smartphones and the Web. You remember those days, don’t you? Back in the 1980s, when teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs, bureaucrats wrote in plain English, and every academic paper was a masterpiece in the art of the essay? (Or was it the 1970s?) The problem with the Internet-is-making-us-illiterate theory, of course,

is that bad prose has burdened readers in every era. Professor Strunk tried to do something about it in 1918, when young Elwyn White was a student in his English class at Cornell.

What today’s doomsayers fail to notice is that the very trends they deplore consist in oral media— radio, telephones, and television—giving way to written ones. Not so long ago it was radio and television that were said to be ruining the language. More than ever before, the currency of our social and cultural lives is the written word. And no, not all of it is the semiliterate ranting of Internet trolls. A little surfing will show that many Internet users value language that is clear, grammatical, and competently spelled and punctuated, not just in printed books and legacy media but in e-zines, blogs, Wikipedia entries, consumer reviews, and even a fair proportion of email. Surveys have shown that college students are writing more than their counterparts in earlier generations did, and that they make no more errors per page of writing.8 And contrary to an urban legend, they 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. Members of the Internet generation, like all language users, fit their phrasing to the setting and audience, and have a good sense of what is appropriate in formal writing.

Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their messages across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous—as Strunk and White put it, “death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram.” Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste,9 and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land.10

Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: “If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it’s, then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.”11 And if that isn’t enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are “huge turn-offs.” As one client said, “If you’re trying to date a woman, I don’t expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren’t you trying to put your best foot forward?”12

Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures. And as we shall see in the first chapter, this thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin.

Chapter 1

Good Writing

REVERSE-ENGINEERING GOOD PROSE AS THE KEY TO DEVELOPING A WRITERLY EAR

Education is an admirable thing,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”1 In dark moments while writing this book, I sometimes feared that Wilde might be right. When I polled some accomplished writers about which style manuals they had consulted during their apprenticeships, the most common answer I got was “none.” Writing, they said, just came naturally to them.

I’d be the last to doubt that good writers are blessed with an innate dose of fluency with syntax and memory for words. But no one is born with skills in English composition per se. Those skills may not have come from stylebooks, but they must have come from somewhere.

That somewhere is the writing of other writers. Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks, and with them a sensitivity to how they mesh and how they clash. This is the elusive “ear” of a skilled writer— the tacit sense of style which every honest stylebook, echoing Wilde, confesses cannot be explicitly taught. Biographers of great authors always try to track down the books their subjects read when they were young, because they know these sources hold the key to their development as writers.

I would not have written this book if I did not believe, contra Wilde, that many principles of style really can be taught. But the starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader. Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose. The goal of this chapter is to provide a glimpse of how that is done. I have picked four passages of twenty-first-century prose, diverse in style and content, and will think aloud as I try to understand what makes them work. My intent is not to honor these passages as if I were bestowing a prize, nor to hold them up as models for you to emulate. It’s to illustrate, via a peek into my stream of consciousness, the habit of lingering over good writing wherever you find it and reflecting on what makes it good.

Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it’s a more inviting one. Much advice on style is stern and censorious. A recent bestseller advocated “zero tolerance” for errors and brandished the words horror, satanic, ghastly, and plummeting standards on its first page. The classic manuals, written by starchy Englishmen and rock-ribbed Yankees, try to take all the fun out of writing, grimly adjuring the writer to avoid offbeat words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration. A famous piece of advice from this school crosses the line from the grim to the infanticidal: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”2

An aspiring writer could be forgiven for thinking that learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp, with a sergeant barking at you for every errant footfall. Why not think of it instead as a form of pleasurable mastery, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game. Though the quest for improvement may be informed by lessons and honed by practice, it must first be kindled by a delight in the best work of the masters and a desire to approach their excellence.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

In the opening lines of Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow, the uncompromising atheist and tireless advocate of science explains why his worldview does not, as the romantic and the religious fear, extinguish a sense of wonder or an appreciation of life.3

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché (“Since the dawn of time”), not with a banality (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of …”), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity. The reader of Unweaving the Rainbow opens the book and is walloped with a reminder of the most dreadful fact we know, and on its heels a paradoxical elaboration. We’re lucky because we’ll die? Who wouldn’t want to find out how this mystery will be solved? The starkness of the paradox is reinforced by the diction and meter: short, simple words, a stressed monosyllable followed by six iambic feet.*

Most people are never going to die. The resolution to the paradox—that a bad thing, dying, implies a good thing, having lived—is explained with parallel constructions: never going to die … never going to be born. The next sentence restates the contrast, also in parallel language, but avoids the tedium of repeating words yet again by juxtaposing familiar idioms that have the same rhythm: been here in my place … see the light of day.

the sand grains of Arabia. A touch of the poetic, better suited to the grandeur that Dawkins seeks to invoke than a colorless adjective like massive or enormous. The expression is snatched from the brink of cliché by its variant wording (sand grains rather than sands) and by its vaguely exotic feel. The phrase sands of Arabia, though common in the early nineteenth century, has plunged in popularity ever since, and there is no longer even a place that is commonly called Arabia; we refer to it as Saudi Arabia or the Arabian Peninsula.4

unborn ghosts. A vivid image to convey the abstract notion of a mathematically possible combination of genes, and a wily repurposing of a supernatural concept to advance a naturalistic argument.

greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. Parallel wording is a powerful trope, but after dying and being born, being here in my place and seeing the light of day, enough is enough. To avoid monotony Dawkins inverts the structure of one of the lines in this couplet. The phrase subtly

alludes to another meditation on unrealized genius, “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,” from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

In the teeth of these stupefying odds. The idiom brings to mind the menacing gape of a predator, reinforcing our gratitude for being alive: to come into existence we narrowly escaped a mortal threat, namely the high odds against it. How high? Every writer faces the challenge of finding a superlative in the English word-hoard that has not been inflated by hyperbole and overuse. In the teeth of these incredible odds? In the teeth of these awesome odds? Meh. Dawkins has found a superlative—to render into a stupor, to make stupid—that still has the power to impress.

Good writing can flip the way the world is perceived, like the silhouette in psychology textbooks which oscillates between a goblet and two faces. In six sentences Dawkins has flipped the way we think of death, and has stated a rationalist’s case for an appreciation of life in words so stirring that many humanists I know have asked that it be read at their funerals.

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically?

I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me.

Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one?

Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day?

In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic. Dawkins’s could fairly be called masculine, with its confrontational opening, its cold abstractions, its aggressive imagery, its glorification of alpha males. Goldstein’s is personal, evocative, reflective, yet intellectually just as rigorous.

at least not unproblematically. The categories of grammar reflect the building blocks of thought— time, space, causality, matter—and a philosophical wordsmith can play with them to awaken her readers to metaphysical conundrums. Here we have an adverb, unproblematically, modifying the verb continue, an ellipsis for continue to be. Ordinarily to be is not the kind of verb that can be modified by an adverb. To be or not to be—it’s hard to see shades of gray there. The unexpected adverb puts an array of metaphysical, theological, and personal questions on the table before us.

a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. Good writing is understood with the mind’s eye.6 The unusual description of the familiar act of eating in terms of its geometry—a piece of fruit intersecting with an o—forces the reader to pause and conjure a mental image of the act rather than skating over a verbal summary. We find the little girl in the photograph endearing not because the author has stooped to telling us so with words like cute or adorable but because we can see her childlike mannerisms for ourselves—as the author herself is doing when pondering the little alien who somehow is her. We see the clumsiness of a small hand manipulating an adult-sized object; the determination to master a challenge we take for granted; the out-of-sync mouth anticipating the sweet, juicy reward. The geometric language also prepares us for the prelinguistic thinking that Goldstein introduces in the next paragraph: we regress to an age at which “to eat” and even “to put in your mouth” are abstractions, several levels removed from the physical challenge of making an object intersect with a body part.

That child is me. But why is she me? … [My point of view] would be as inaccessible to her … as hers is now to me. … There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else? Goldstein repeatedly juxtaposes nouns and pronouns in the first and third person: that child … me; she … I … herself; I … someone else. The syntactic confusion about which grammatical person belongs in which phrase reflects our intellectual confusion about the very meaning of the concept “person.” She also plays with to be, the quintessentially existential verb, to engage our existential puzzlement: Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? … Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one?

frilly white pinafore. The use of an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned garment helps date the snapshot for us, without the cliché faded photograph.

The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. After eighteen sentences that mix wistful nostalgia with abstract philosophizing, the reverie is punctured by a stark revelation. However painful it must have been to predicate the harsh word dead of a beloved sister, no euphemism—has passed away, is no longer with us—could have ended that sentence. The topic of the discussion is how we struggle to reconcile the indubitable fact of death with our incomprehension of the possibility that a person can no longer exist. Our linguistic ancestors parlayed that incomprehension into euphemisms like passed on in which death consists of a journey to a remote location. Had Goldstein settled for these weasel words, she would have undermined her analysis before it began.

I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease

altogether? This passage fills my eyes every time I read it, and not just because it is about a sister-in- law I will never meet. With a spare restatement of what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness (A person … is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world), Goldstein creates an effect that is richly emotional. The puzzlement in having to make sense of this abstract philosophical conundrum mingles with the poignancy of having to come to terms with the loss of someone we love. It is not just the selfish realization that we have been robbed of their third-person company, but the unselfish realization that they have been robbed of their first-person experience.

The passage also reminds us of the overlap in techniques for writing fiction and nonfiction. The interweaving of the personal and the philosophical in this excerpt is being used as an expository device, to help us understand the issues that Spinoza wrote about. But it is also a theme that runs through Goldstein’s fiction, namely that the obsessions of academic philosophy—personal identity, consciousness, truth, will, meaning, morality—are of a piece with the obsessions of human beings as they try to make sense of their lives.

MAURICE SENDAK, AUTHOR OF SPLENDID NIGHTMARES, DIES AT 83

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying, and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. …

Roundly praised, intermittently censored, and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children.

PAULINE PHILLIPS, FLINTY ADVISER TO MILLIONS AS DEAR ABBY, DIES AT 94

Dear Abby: My wife sleeps in the raw. Then she showers, brushes her teeth and fixes our breakfast—still in the buff. We’re newlyweds and there are just the two of us, so I suppose there’s really nothing wrong with it. What do you think?—Ed Dear Ed: It’s O.K. with me. But tell her to put on an apron when she’s frying bacon.

Pauline Phillips, a California housewife who nearly 60 years ago, seeking something more meaningful than mah-jongg, transformed herself into the syndicated columnist Dear Abby—and in so doing became a trusted, tart-tongued adviser to tens of millions—died on Wednesday in Minneapolis. …

With her comic and flinty yet fundamentally sympathetic voice, Mrs. Phillips helped wrestle the advice column from its weepy Victorian past into a hard-nosed 20th-century present. …

Dear Abby: Our son married a girl when he was in the service. They were married in February and she had an 8 1/2-pound baby girl in August. She said the baby was premature. Can an 8 1/2-pound baby be this premature?— Wanting to Know Dear Wanting: The baby was on time. The wedding was late. Forget it.

Mrs. Phillips began her life as the columnist Abigail Van Buren in 1956. She quickly became known for her astringent, often genteelly risqué, replies to queries that included the marital, the medical, and sometimes both at once.

HELEN GURLEY BROWN, WHO GAVE “SINGLE GIRL” A LIFE IN FULL, DIES AT 90

Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of Sex and the Single Girl shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but thoroughly enjoyed it—and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more—died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger. …

As Cosmopolitan’s editor from 1965 until 1997, Ms. Brown was widely credited with being the first to introduce frank discussions of sex into magazines for women. The look of women’s magazines today—a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines—is due in no small part to her influence.

My third selection, also related to death, showcases yet another tone and style, and stands as further proof that good writing does not fit into a single formula. With deadpan wit, an affection for eccentricity, and a deft use of the English lexicon, the linguist and journalist Margalit Fox has perfected the art of the obituary.7

plunged [the picture book] into the dark, terrifying, and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche; a trusted, tart-tongued adviser to tens of millions; a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines. When you have to capture a life in just eight hundred words, you have to choose those words carefully. Fox has found some mots justes and packed them into readable phrases which put the lie to the lazy excuse that you can’t sum up a complex subject—in this case a life’s accomplishments—in just a few words.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored, and occasionally eaten. This is a zeugma: the intentional juxtaposition of different senses of a single word. In this list, the word books is being used in the sense of both their narrative content (which can be praised or censored) and their physical form (which can be eaten). Along with putting a smile on the reader’s face, the zeugma subtly teases the bluenoses who objected to the nudity in Sendak’s drawings by juxtaposing their censorship with the innocence of the books’ readership.

and in turn for their children. A simple phrase that tells a story—a generation of children grew up with such fond memories of Sendak’s books that they read them to their own children—and that serves as an understated tribute to the great artist.

Dear Abby: My wife sleeps in the raw. Beginning the obit with a bang, this sample column instantly brings a pang of nostalgia to the millions of readers who grew up reading Dear Abby, and graphically introduces her life’s work to those who did not. We see for ourselves, rather than having to be told about, the offbeat problems, the waggish replies, the (for her time) liberal sensibility.

Dear Abby: Our son married a girl when he was in the service. The deliberate use of surprising transitions—colons, dashes, block quotations—is one of the hallmarks of lively prose.8 A lesser writer might have introduced this with the plodding “Here is another example of a column by Mrs. Phillips,” but Fox interrupts her narration without warning to redirect our gaze to Phillips in her prime. A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts.

the marital, the medical, and sometimes both at once. Killjoy style manuals tell writers to avoid alliteration, but good prose is enlivened with moments of poetry, like this line with its pleasing meter and its impish pairing of marital and medical.

She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger. A sly twist on the formulaic reporting and ponderous tone of conventional obituaries. We soon learn that Brown was a champion of women’s sexual self-definition, so we understand the innuendo about cosmetic surgery as good- natured rather than catty—as a joke that Brown herself would have enjoyed.

hauntingly, flinty, tart-tongued, weepy, hard-nosed, astringent, genteelly, risqué, voluptuous, titillating. In selecting these uncommon adjectives and adverbs, Fox defies two of the commonest advisories in the stylebooks: Write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs, and Never use an uncommon, fancy word when a common, plain one will do.

But the rules are badly stated. It’s certainly true that a lot of turgid prose is stuffed with polysyllabic Latinisms (cessation for end, eventuate in for cause) and flabby adjectives (is contributive to instead of contributes to, is determinative of instead of determines). And showing off with fancy words you barely understand can make you look pompous and occasionally ridiculous. But a skilled writer can enliven and sometimes electrify her prose with the judicious insertion of a surprising word. According to studies of writing quality, a varied vocabulary and the use of unusual words are two of the features that distinguish sprightly prose from mush.9

The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound.10 It’s no coincidence that haunting means “haunting” and tart means “tart,” rather than the other way around; just listen to your voice and sense your muscles as you articulate them. Voluptuous has a voluptuous give-and-take between the lips and the tongue, and titillating also gives the tongue a workout while titillating the ear with a coincidental but unignorable overlap with a naughty word. These associations make a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines more lively than a sea of sexy models and provocative cover lines. And a sea of pulchritudinous models would have served as a lesson on how not to choose words: the ugly pulchritude sounds like the opposite of what it means, and it is one of those words that no one ever uses unless they are trying to show off.

But sometimes even show-off words can work. In her obituary of the journalist Mike McGrady, who masterminded a 1979 literary hoax in which a deliberately awful bodice ripper became an international bestseller, Fox wrote, “Naked Came the Stranger was written by 25 Newsday journalists in an era when newsrooms were arguably more relaxed and inarguably more bibulous.”11

The playful bibulous, “tending to drink too much,” is related to beverage and imbibe and calls to mind babbling, bobbling, bubbling, and burbling. Readers who want to become writers should read with a dictionary at hand (several are available as smartphone apps), and writers should not hesitate to send their readers there if the word is dead-on in meaning, evocative in sound, and not so obscure that the reader will never see it again. (You can probably do without maieutic, propaedeutic, and subdoxastic.) I write with a thesaurus, mindful of the advice I once read in a bicycle repair manual on how to squeeze a dent out of a rim with Vise-Grip pliers: “Do not get carried away with the destructive potential of this tool.”

From the early years of the twentieth century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make. There were sharecroppers losing at settlement. Typists wanting to work in an office. Yard boys scared that a single gesture near the planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree. They were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay, and they each had a decision before them. In this, they were not unlike anyone who ever longed to cross the Atlantic or the Rio Grande.

It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country. The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take a lifetime to play out.

Historians would come to call it the Great Migration. It would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century. …

The actions of the people in this book were both universal and distinctly American. Their migration was a response to an

economic and social structure not of their making. They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable—what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Scotch-Irish did in Oklahoma when the land turned to dust, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the landless in Russia, Italy, China, and elsewhere did when something better across the ocean called to them. What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done.

They left.

In The Warmth of Other Suns, the journalist Isabel Wilkerson ensured that the story of the Great Migration would be underreported no longer.12 Calling it “great” is no exaggeration. The movement of millions of African Americans from the Deep South to Northern cities set off the civil rights movement, redrew the urban landscape, rewrote the agenda of American politics and education, and transformed American culture and, with it, world culture.

Wilkerson not only rectifies the world’s ignorance about the Great Migration, but with twelve hundred interviews and crystalline prose she makes us understand it in its full human reality. We live in an era of social science, and have become accustomed to understanding the social world in terms of “forces,” “pressures,” “processes,” and “developments.” It is easy to forget that those “forces” are statistical summaries of the deeds of millions of men and women who act on their beliefs in pursuit of their desires. The habit of submerging the individual into abstractions can lead not only to bad science (it’s not as if the “social forces” obeyed Newton’s laws) but to dehumanization. We are apt to think, “I (and my kind) choose to do things for reasons; he (and his kind) are part of a social process.” This was a moral of Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” which warned against dehumanizing abstraction: “Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.” With an allergy to abstraction and a phobia of cliché, Wilkerson trains a magnifying glass on the historical blob called “the Great Migration” and reveals the humanity of the people who compose it.

From the early years of the twentieth century to well past its middle age. Not even the chronology is described in conventional language: the century is an aging person, a contemporary of the story’s protagonists.

Typists wanting to work in an office. Not “denial of economic opportunities.” By invoking a moderately skilled occupation from an earlier era, Wilkerson invites us to imagine the desperation of a woman who has acquired a proficiency that could lift her from the cotton fields to a professional office but who is denied the chance because of the color of her skin.

Yard boys scared that a single gesture near the planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree. Not “oppression,” not “the threat of violence,” not even “lynching,” but a horrific physical image. We even see what kind of tree it is.

as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay. Once again prose is brought to life with a snatch of poetry, as in this simile with its sensual image, its whiff of allusion (I think of Martin Luther King’s “red hills of Georgia”), and its lyrical anapest meter.

anyone who ever longed to cross the Atlantic or the Rio Grande. Not “immigrants from Europe or Mexico.” Once again the people are not sociological categories. The author forces us to visualize

bodies in motion and to remember the motives that pulled them along. what the pilgrims did … what the Scotch-Irish did … what the European Jews did … what the

landless in Russia, Italy, China, and elsewhere did. Wilkerson begins the paragraph by stating that the actions of her protagonists are universal, but she does not rest with that generalization. She nominates the Great Migration for inclusion in a list of storied emigrations (expressed in pleasingly parallel syntax), whose descendants doubtless include many of her readers. Those readers are implicitly invited to apply their respect for their ancestors’ courage and sacrifice to the forgotten pilgrims of the Great Migration.

when the land turned to dust, not “the Dust Bowl”; when there was nothing to eat, not “the Potato Famine”; the landless, not “the peasants.” Wilkerson will not allow us to snooze through a recitation of familiar verbiage. Fresh wording and concrete images force us to keep updating the virtual reality display in our minds.

They left. Among the many dumb rules of paragraphing foisted on students in composition courses is the one that says that a paragraph may not consist of a single sentence. Wilkerson ends a richly descriptive introductory chapter with a paragraph composed of exactly two syllables. The abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the bottom of the page mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that lay ahead. Good writing finishes strong.

The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.

The authors also share an attitude: they do not hide the passion and relish that drive them to tell us about their subjects. They write as if they have something important to say. But no, that doesn’t capture it. They write as if they have something important to show. And that, we shall see, is a key ingredient in the sense of style.

Chapter 2

A Window onto the World

CLASSIC STYLE AS AN ANTIDOTE FOR ACADEMESE, BUREAUCRATESE, CORPORATESE, LEGALESE, OFFICIALESE, AND OTHER KINDS OF STUFFY PROSE

Writing is an unnatural act.1 As Charles Darwin observed, “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.” 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.

Speech and writing differ in their mechanics, of course, and that is one reason children must struggle with writing: it takes practice to reproduce the sounds of language with a pencil or a keyboard. But they differ in another way, which makes the acquisition of writing a lifelong challenge even after the mechanics have been mastered. Speaking and writing involve very different kinds of human relationship, and only the one associated with speech comes naturally to us. Spoken conversation is instinctive because social interaction is instinctive: we speak to those with whom we are on speaking terms. When we engage our conversational partners, we have an inkling of what they know and what they might be interested in learning, and as we chat with them, we monitor their eyes, their face, and their posture. If they need clarification, or cannot swallow an assertion, or have something to add, they can break into the conversation or follow up in turn.

We enjoy none of this give-and-take when we cast our bread upon the waters by sending a written missive out into the world. The recipients are invisible and inscrutable, and we have to get through to them without knowing much about them or seeing their reactions. At the time that we write, the reader exists only in our imaginations. Writing is above all an act of pretense. We have to visualize ourselves in some kind of conversation, or correspondence, or oration, or soliloquy, and put words into the mouth of the little avatar who represents us in this simulated world.

The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate. There are many possibilities. A person thumb-typing a text message can get away with acting as if he is taking part in a real conversation.* A college student who writes a term paper is pretending that he knows more about his subject than the reader and that his goal is to supply the reader with information she needs, whereas in reality his reader typically knows more about the subject than he does and has no need for the information, the actual goal of the exercise being to give the student practice for the real thing. An activist composing a manifesto, or a minister drafting a sermon, must write as if they are standing in front of a crowd and whipping up their emotions.

Which simulation should a writer immerse himself in when composing a piece for a more generic

readership, such as an essay, an article, a review, an editorial, a newsletter, or a blog post? The literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner have singled out one model of prose as an aspiration for such writers today. They call it classic style, and explain it in a wonderful little book called Clear and Simple as the Truth.

The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation.

A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation. The nature of each experience shapes the way that classic prose is written. The metaphor of showing implies that there is something to see. The things in the world the writer is pointing to, then, are concrete: people (or other animate beings) who move around in the world and interact with objects.2 The metaphor of conversation implies that the reader is cooperative. The writer can count on her to read between the lines, catch his drift, and connect the dots, without his having to spell out every step in his train of thought.3

Classic prose, Thomas and Turner explain, is just one kind of style, whose invention they credit to seventeenth-century French writers such as Descartes and La Rochefoucauld. The differences between classic style and other styles can be appreciated by comparing their stances on the communication scenario: how the writer imagines himself to be related to the reader, and what the writer is trying to accomplish.

Classic style is not a contemplative or romantic style, in which a writer tries to share his idiosyncratic, emotional, and mostly ineffable reactions to something. Nor is it a prophetic, oracular, or oratorical style, where the writer has the gift of being able to see things that no one else can, and uses the music of language to unite an audience.

Less obviously, classic style differs from practical style, like the language of memos, manuals, term papers, and research reports. (Traditional stylebooks such as Strunk and White are mainly guides to practical style.) In practical style, the writer and reader have defined roles (supervisor and employee, teacher and student, technician and customer), and the writer’s goal is to satisfy the reader’s need. Writing in practical style may conform to a fixed template (a five-paragraph essay, a report in a scientific journal), and it is brief because the reader needs the information in a timely manner. Writing in classic style, in contrast, takes whatever form and whatever length the writer needs to present an interesting truth. The classic writer’s brevity “comes from the elegance of his mind, never from pressures of time or employment.”4

Classic style also differs subtly from plain style, where everything is in full view and the reader

needs no help in seeing anything. In classic style the writer has worked hard to find something worth showing and the perfect vantage point from which to see it. The reader may have to work hard to discern it, but her efforts will be rewarded. Classic style, Thomas and Turner explain, is aristocratic, not egalitarian: “Truth is available to all who are willing to work to achieve it, but truth is certainly not commonly possessed by all and is no one’s birthright.”5 The early bird gets the worm, for example, is plain. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese is classic.

Classic style overlaps with plain and practical styles. And all three differ from self-conscious, relativistic, ironic, or postmodern styles, in which “the writer’s chief, if unstated, concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naiveté about his own enterprise.” As Thomas and Turner note, “When we open a cookbook, we completely put aside—and expect the author to put aside—the kind of question that leads to the heart of certain philosophic and religious traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is food something about which knowledge is possible? Can anyone else ever tell us anything true about cooking? … Classic style similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise. If it took those questions up, it could never get around to treating its subject, and its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject.”6

The different prose styles are not sharply demarcated, and many kinds of writing blend the different styles or alternate between them. (Academic writing, for example, tends to mix practical and self- conscious styles.) Classic style is an ideal. Not all prose should be classic, and not all writers can carry off the pretense. But knowing the hallmarks of classic style will make anyone a better writer, and it is the strongest cure I know for the disease that enfeebles academic, bureaucratic, corporate, legal, and official prose.

At first glance classic style sounds naïve and philistine, suited only to a world of concrete goings-on. Not so. Classic style is not the same as the common but unhelpful advice to “avoid abstraction.” Sometimes we do have to write about abstract ideas. What classic style does is explain them as if they were objects and forces that would be recognizable to anyone standing in a position to see them. Let’s see how classic style is used by the physicist Brian Greene to explain one of the most exotic ideas the human mind has ever entertained, the theory of multiple universes.7

Greene begins with the observation by astronomers in the 1920s that galaxies were moving away from each other:

If space is now expanding, then at ever earlier times the universe must have been ever smaller. At some moment in the distant past, everything we now see—the ingredients responsible for every planet, every star, every galaxy, even space itself —must have been compressed to an infinitesimal speck that then swelled outward, evolving into the universe as we know it.

The big-bang theory was born. … Yet scientists were aware that the big-bang theory suffered from a significant shortcoming. Of all things, it leaves out the bang. Einstein’s equations do a wonderful job of describing how the universe evolved from a split second after the bang, but the equations break down (similar to the error message returned by a calculator when you try to divide 1 by 0) when applied to the extreme environment of the universe’s earliest moment. The big bang thus provides no insight into what might have powered the bang itself.

Greene does not tut-tut over the fact that this reasoning depends on complex mathematics. Instead he shows us, with images and everyday examples, what the math reveals. We accept the theory of the big bang by watching a movie of expanding space running backwards. We appreciate the abstruse

concept of equations breaking down through an example, division by zero, which we can understand for ourselves in either of two ways. We can think it through: What could dividing a number into zero parts actually mean? Or we can punch the numbers into our calculators and see the error message ourselves.

Greene then tells us that astronomers recently made a surprising discovery, which he illustrates with an analogy:

Just as the pull of earth’s gravity slows the ascent of a ball tossed upward, the gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing the expansion of space. … [But] far from slowing down, the expansion of space went into overdrive about 7 billion years ago and has been speeding up ever since. That’s like gently tossing a ball upward, having it slow down initially, but then rocket upward ever more quickly.

But soon they found an explanation, which he illustrates with a looser simile: We’re all used to gravity being a force that does only one thing: pull objects toward each other. But in Einstein’s … theory of relativity, gravity can also … push things apart. … If space contains … an invisible energy, sort of like an invisible mist that’s uniformly spread through space, then the gravity exerted by the energy mist would be repulsive.

The dark energy hypothesis, however, led to yet another mystery: When the astronomers deduced how much dark energy would have to permeate every nook and cranny of space to account for the observed cosmic speedup, they found a number that no one has been able to explain … :

.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000138.

By displaying this number in all its multi-zeroed glory, Greene impresses upon us the fact that it is very small yet oddly precise. He then points out that it is hard to explain that value because it seems to be fine-tuned to allow life on earth to come into being:

In universes with larger amounts of dark energy, whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies, the repulsive push of the dark energy is so strong that the clump gets blown apart, thwarting galactic formation. In universes whose dark-energy value is much smaller, the repulsive push changes to an attractive pull, causing those universes to collapse back on themselves so quickly that again galaxies wouldn’t form. And without galaxies, there are no stars, no planets, and so in those universes there’s no chance for our form of life to exist.

To the rescue comes an idea which (Greene showed us earlier) explained the bang in the big bang. According to the theory of inflationary cosmology, empty space can spawn other big bangs, creating a vast number of other universes: a multiverse. This makes the precise value of dark energy in our universe less surprising:

We find ourselves in this universe and not another for much the same reason we find ourselves on earth and not on Neptune —we find ourselves where conditions are ripe for our form of life.

Of course! As long as there are many planets, one of them is likely to be at a hospitable distance from the sun, and no one thinks it’s sensible to ask why we find ourselves on that planet rather than on Neptune. So it would be if there are many universes.

But scientists still faced a problem, which Greene illustrates with an analogy: Just as it takes a well-stocked shoe store to guarantee you’ll find your size, only a well-stocked multiverse can guarantee that our universe, with its peculiar amount of dark energy, will be represented. On its own, inflationary cosmology falls short of the mark. While its never-ending series of big bangs would yield an immense collection of universes, many would have similar features, like a shoe store with stacks and stacks of sizes 5 and 13, but nothing in the size you seek.

The piece that completes the puzzle is string theory, according to which “the tally of possible universes stands at the almost incomprehensible 10500, a number so large it defies analogy.”

By combining inflationary cosmology and string theory, … the stock room of universes overflows: in the hands of inflation, string theory’s enormously diverse collection of possible universes become actual universes, brought to life by one big bang after another. Our universe is then virtually guaranteed to be among them. And because of the special features necessary for our form of life, that’s the universe we inhabit.

In just three thousand words, Greene has caused us to understand a mind-boggling idea, with no apology that the physics and math behind the theory might be hard for him to explain or for readers to understand. He narrates a series of events with the confidence that anyone looking at them will know what they imply, because the examples he has chosen are exact. Division by zero is a perfect example of “equations breaking down”; gravity tugs at a tossed ball in exactly the way it slows cosmic expansion; the improbability of finding a precisely specified item in a small pool of possibilities applies to both the sizes of shoes in a store and the values of physical constants in a multiverse. The examples are not so much metaphors or analogies as they are actual instances of the phenomena he is explaining, and they are instances that readers can see with their own eyes. This is classic style.

It may not be a coincidence that Greene, like many scientists since Galileo, is a lucid expositor of difficult ideas, because the ideal of classic prose is congenial to the worldview of the scientist. Contrary to the common misunderstanding in which Einstein proved that everything is relative and Heisenberg proved that observers always affect what they observe, most scientists believe that there are objective truths about the world and that they can be discovered by a disinterested observer.

By the same token, the guiding image of classic prose could not be further from the worldview of relativist academic ideologies such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and literary Marxism. And not coincidentally, it was scholars with these worldviews who consistently won the annual Bad Writing Contest, a publicity stunt held by the philosopher Denis Dutton during the late 1990s.8 First place in 1997 went to the eminent critic Fredric Jameson for the opening sentence of his book on film criticism:

The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).

The assertion that “the visual is essentially pornographic” is not, to put it mildly, a fact about the world that anyone can see. The phrase “which is to say” promises an explanation, but it is just as baffling: can’t something have “its end in rapt, mindless fascination” without being pornographic? The puzzled reader is put on notice that her ability to understand the world counts for nothing; her role is to behold the enigmatic pronouncements of the great scholar. Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.

The winning entry for 1998, by another eminent critic, Judith Butler, is also a defiant repudiation of classic style:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the

question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

A reader of this intimidating passage can marvel at Butler’s ability to juggle abstract propositions about still more abstract propositions, with no real-world referent in sight. We have a move from an account of an understanding to a view with a rearticulation of a question, which reminds me of the Hollywood party in Annie Hall where a movie producer is overheard saying, “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.” What the reader cannot do is understand it—to see with her own eyes what Butler is seeing. Insofar as the passage has a meaning at all, it seems to be that some scholars have come to realize that power can change over time.

The abstruseness of the contest winners’ writing is deceptive. Most academics can effortlessly dispense this kind of sludge, and many students, like Zonker Harris in this Doonesbury cartoon, acquire the skill without having to be taught:

Doonesbury © 1972 g. b. trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.

Just as deceptive is the plain language of Greene’s explanation of the multiverse. It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate. As Dolly Parton said, “You wouldn’t believe how much it costs to look this cheap.”

The confident presentation of an idea in classic style should not be confused with an arrogant insistence that it is correct. Elsewhere in his essay, Greene does not hide the fact that many of his fellow physicists think that string theory and the multiverse are extravagant and unproven. He only wants readers to understand them. Thomas and Turner explain that the reader of classic prose “may conclude that a text is masterful, classic, and completely wrong.”9

And for all its directness, classic style remains a pretense, an imposture, a stance. Even scientists, with their commitment to seeing the world as it is, are a bit postmodern. They recognize that it’s hard to know the truth, that the world doesn’t just reveal itself to us, that we understand the world through our theories and constructs, which are not pictures but abstract propositions, and that our ways of understanding the world must constantly be scrutinized for hidden biases. It’s just that good writers

don’t flaunt this anxiety in every passage they write; they artfully conceal it for clarity’s sake. Remembering that classic style is a pretense also makes sense of the seemingly outlandish

requirement that a writer know the truth before putting it into words and not use the writing process to organize and clarify his thoughts. Of course no writer works that way, but that is irrelevant. The goal of classic style is to make it seem as if the writer’s thoughts were fully formed before he clothed them in words. As with the celebrity chef in the immaculate television kitchen who pulls a perfect soufflé out of the oven in the show’s final minute, the messy work has been done beforehand and behind the scenes.

The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. The first subsection introduces the concept of “metadiscourse,” followed by one of its principal manifestations, the use of signposting. The second subsection reviews three issues: the problem of focusing on a description of professional activity rather than an exposition of subject matter, the overuse of apologetic language, and the disadvantages of excessive hedging. Following this, the third subsection explains the issue of prespecified verbal formulas. The fourth subsection covers issues having to do with excessive abstraction, including overuse of nominalizations and passives. Finally, I will review the main points of the preceding discussion.

Did you get all that? I didn’t think so. That tedious paragraph was filled with metadiscourse—verbiage about verbiage,

such as subsection, review, and discussion. Inexperienced writers often think they’re doing the reader a favor by guiding her through the rest of the text with a detailed preview. In reality, previews that read like a scrunched-up table of contents are there to help the writer, not the reader. At this point in the presentation, the terms mean nothing to the reader, and the list is too long and arbitrary to stay in memory for long.

The previous paragraph reviewed the concept of metadiscourse. This paragraph introduces one of its primary manifestations, the phenomenon of signposting.

Clumsy writers do a lot of that, too. They unthinkingly follow the advice to say what you’re going to say, say it, and then say what you’ve said. The advice comes from classical rhetoric, and it makes sense for long orations: if a listener’s mind momentarily wanders, the passage she has missed is gone forever. It’s not as necessary in writing, where a reader can backtrack and look up what she’s missed. And it can be intrusive in classic style, which simulates a conversation. You would never announce to a companion, “I’m going to say three things to you. The first thing I’m going to say is that a woodpecker has just landed on that tree.” You’d just say it.

The problem with thoughtless signposting is that the reader has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to, like complicated directions for a shortcut which take longer to figure out than the time the shortcut would save. It’s better if the route is clearly enough laid out that every turn is obvious when you get to it. Good writing takes advantage of a reader’s expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.

It’s not that authors should avoid signposting altogether. Even casual chitchat has some signposting. Let me tell you a story. To make a long story short. In other words. As I was saying. Mark my words. Did you hear the one about the minister, the priest, and the rabbi? Like all writing decisions, the amount of signposting requires judgment and compromise: too much, and the reader bogs down in reading the signposts; too little, and she has no idea where she is being led.

The art of classic prose is to signpost sparingly, as we do in conversation, and with a minimum of metadiscourse. One way to introduce a topic without metadiscourse is to open with a question:

This chapter discusses the factors that cause names to rise and fall in popularity.

What makes a name rise and fall in popularity?

Another is to use the guiding metaphor behind classic style, vision. The content in a passage of writing is treated like a happening in the world that can be seen with one’s eyeballs:

The preceding paragraph demonstrated that parents sometimes give a boy’s name to a girl, but never vice versa.

As we have seen, parents sometimes give a boy’s name to a girl, but never vice versa.

And since seeing implies seers, we no longer have to refer to paragraphs “demonstrating” some things and sections “summarizing” other things, as if blocks of printing had a mind of their own. The active parties are the writer and the reader, who are taking in the spectacle together, and the writer can refer to them with the good old pronoun we. That supplies him with still other metaphors that can replace metadiscourse, such as moving together or cooperating on a project:

The previous section analyzed the source of word sounds. This section raises the question of word meanings.

Now that we have explored the source of word sounds, we arrive at the puzzle of word meanings.

The first topic to be discussed is proper names. Let’s begin with proper names.

As for the advice to say what you said, the key is the expression “in other words.” There’s no sense in copying a sentence from every paragraph and pasting them together at the end. That just forces the reader to figure out the point of those sentences all over again, and it is tantamount to a confession that the author isn’t presenting ideas (which can always be clothed in different language) but just shuffling words around the page. A summary should repeat enough of the key words to allow the reader to connect it back to the earlier passages that spelled out the points in detail. But those words should be fitted into new sentences that work together as a coherent passage of prose in its own right. The summary should be self-contained, almost as if the material being summarized had never existed.

Metadiscourse is not the only form of self-consciousness that bogs down professional prose. Another is a confusion of the writer’s subject matter with his line of work. Writers live in two universes. One is the world of the thing they study: the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, the development of language in children, the Taiping Rebellion in China. The other is the world of their profession: getting articles published, going to conferences, keeping up with the trends and gossip. Most of a researcher’s

waking hours are spent in the second world, and it’s easy for him to confuse the two. The result is the typical opening of an academic paper:

In recent years, an increasing number of psychologists and linguists have turned their attention to the problem of child language acquisition. In this article, recent research on this process will be reviewed.

No offense, but very few people are interested in how professors spend their time. Classic style ignores the hired help and looks directly at what they are being paid to study:

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

To be fair, sometimes the topic of conversation really is the activity of researchers, such as an overview intended to introduce graduate students or other insiders to the scholarly literature in their chosen profession. But researchers are apt to lose sight of whom they are writing for, and narcissistically describe the obsessions of their guild rather than what the audience really wants to know. Professional narcissism is by no means confined to academia. Journalists assigned to an issue often cover the coverage, creating the notorious media echo chamber. Museum signs explain how the shard in the showcase fits into a classification of pottery styles rather than who made it or what it was used for. Music and movie guides are dominated by data on how much money a work grossed the weekend it was released, or how many weeks it spent in the theaters or on the charts. Governments and corporations organize their Web sites around their bureaucratic structure rather than the kinds of information a user seeks.

Self-conscious writers are also apt to whinge about how what they’re about to do is so terribly difficult and complicated and controversial:

What are intractable conflicts? “Intractability” is a controversial concept, which means different things to different people.

Resilience to stress is a complex multidimensional construct. Although there is no one universally accepted definition of resilience, it is generally understood as the ability to bounce back from hardship and trauma.

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.

The last of these quotations is a pastiche, but the other two are real, and all are typical of the inward- looking style that makes academic writing so tedious. In classic style, the writer credits the reader with enough intelligence to realize that many concepts aren’t easy to define and that many controversies aren’t easy to resolve. She is there to see what the writer will do about it.

Another bad habit of self-conscious writing is the prissy use of quotation marks—sometimes called shudder quotes or scare quotes—to distance the writer from a common idiom:

By combining forces, you could make the “whole more than the sum of its parts.” But this is not the “take home message.” They may be able to “think outside the box” even when everybody else has a fixed approach, but they do not always note when

“enough is enough.” It began as a movement led by a few “young turks” against an “old guard” who dominated the profession. She is a “quick study” and has been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her.

The authors seem to be saying, “I couldn’t think of a more dignified way of putting this, but please don’t think I’m a flibbertigibbet who talks this way; I really am a serious scholar.” The problem goes

beyond prissiness. In the last example, taken from a letter of recommendation, are we supposed to think that the student is a quick study, or that she is a “quick study”—someone who is alleged or rumored by others to be a quick study, but really isn’t? The use of shudder quotes is taken to an extreme in the agonizingly self-conscious, defiantly un-classic style of postmodernism, which rejects the possibility that any word can ever refer to anything, or even that there is an objectively existing world for words to refer to. Hence the 2004 headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion on the passing of postmodernism’s leading light: JACQUES DERRIDA “DIES.”

Quotation marks have a number of legitimate uses, such as reproducing someone else’s words (She said, “Fiddlesticks!”), mentioning a word as a word rather than using it to convey its meaning (The New York Times uses “millenniums,” not “millennia”), and signaling that the writer does not accept the meaning of a word as it is being used by others in this context (They executed their sister to preserve the family’s “honor”). Squeamishness about one’s own choice of words is not among them. Classic style is confident about its own voice. If you’re not comfortable using an expression without apologetic quotation marks, you probably shouldn’t be using it at all.

And then there’s compulsive hedging. Many writers cushion their prose with wads of fluff that imply that they are not willing to stand behind what they are saying, including almost, apparently, comparatively, fairly, in part, nearly, partially, predominantly, presumably, rather, relatively, seemingly, so to speak, somewhat, sort of, to a certain degree, to some extent, and the ubiquitous I would argue (does this mean that you would argue for your position if things were different, but are not willing to argue for it now?). Consider the “virtually” in the letter of recommendation excerpted above. Did the writer really mean to say that there are some areas the student was interested in where she didn’t bother to educate herself, or perhaps that she tried to educate herself in those areas but lacked the competence to do so? And then there’s the scientist who showed me a picture of her four- year-old daughter and said, beaming, “We virtually adore her.”

Writers acquire the hedge habit to conform to the bureaucratic imperative that’s abbreviated as CYA, which I’ll spell out as Cover Your Anatomy. They hope it will get them off the hook, or at least allow them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, should a critic ever try to prove them wrong. It’s the same reason that lawsuit-wary journalists drizzle the words allegedly and reportedly throughout their copy, as in The alleged victim was found lying in a pool of blood with a knife in his back.

There is an alternative slogan to Cover Your Anatomy: So Sue Me. A classic writer counts on the common sense and ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means “in general” or “all else being equal.” If someone tells you that Liz wants to move out of Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t interpret him as claiming that it rains there twenty-four hours a day seven days a week just because he didn’t qualify his statement with relatively rainy or somewhat rainy. As Thomas and Turner explain, “Accuracy becomes pedantry if it is indulged for its own sake. A classic writer will phrase a subordinate point precisely but without the promise that it is technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged on these points because they are mere scaffolding.”10 Any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway.

Sometimes a writer has no choice but to hedge a statement. Better still, the writer can qualify the statement, that is, spell out the circumstances in which it does not hold, rather than leaving himself an escape hatch or being coy as to whether he really means it. A statement in a legal document will be interpreted adversarially, without the presumption of cooperation that governs an ordinary conversation, so every exception must be spelled out. A scholar who is proposing a hypothesis must go on the record with it in as precise a form as possible at least once so that critics can see exactly what he is claiming and give it their best shot. And if there is a reasonable chance that readers will misinterpret a statistical tendency as an absolute law, a responsible writer will anticipate the oversight and qualify the generalization accordingly. Pronouncements like “Democracies don’t fight wars,” “Men are better than women at geometry problems,” and “Eating broccoli prevents cancer” do not do justice to the reality that these phenomena consist at most of small differences in the means of two overlapping bell curves. Since there are serious consequences to misinterpreting these statements as absolute laws, a responsible writer should insert a qualifier like on average or all things being equal, together with a slightly or somewhat. Best of all is to convey the magnitude of the effect and the degree of certainty explicitly, in unhedged statements such as “During the twentieth century, democracies were half as likely to go to war with each other as autocracies were.” It’s not that good writers never hedge their claims. It’s that their hedging is a choice, not a tic.

Paradoxically, intensifiers like very, highly, and extremely also work like hedges. They not only fuzz up a writer’s prose but can undermine his intent. If I’m wondering who pilfered the petty cash, it’s more reassuring to hear Not Jones; he’s an honest man than Not Jones; he’s a very honest man. The reason is that unmodified adjectives and nouns tend to be interpreted categorically: honest means “completely honest,” or at least “completely honest in the way that matters here” (just as Jack drank the bottle of beer implies that he chugged down all of it, not just a sip or two). As soon as you add an intensifier, you’re turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scale. True, you’re trying to place your subject high on the scale—say, an 8.7 out of 10—but it would have been better if the reader were not considering his relative degree of honesty in the first place. That’s the basis for the common advice (usually misattributed to Mark Twain) to “substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be”—though today the substitution would have to be of a word stronger than damn.11

Classic prose is a pleasant illusion, like losing yourself in a play. The writer must work to keep up the impression that his prose is a window onto the scene rather than just a mess of words. Like an actor with a wooden delivery, a writer who relies on canned verbal formulas will break the spell. This is the kind of writer who gets the ball rolling in his search for the holy grail, but finds that it’s neither a magic bullet nor a slam dunk, so he rolls with the punches and lets the chips fall where they may while seeing the glass as half-full, which is easier said than done.

Avoid clichés like the plague—it’s a no-brainer.12 When a reader is forced to work through one stale idiom after another, she stops converting the language into mental images and slips back into just mouthing the words.13 Even worse, since a cliché-monger has turned off his own visual brain as he plonks down one dead idiom after another, he will inevitably mix his metaphors, and a reader who

does keep her visual brain going will be distracted by the ludicrous imagery. The price of chicken wings, the company’s bread and butter, had risen. Leica had been coasting on its laurels. Microsoft began a low-octane swan song. Jeff is a renaissance man, drilling down to the core issues and pushing the envelope. Unless you bite the bullet, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot. No one has yet invented a condom that will knock people’s socks off. How low can the team sink? Sky’s the limit!

Even when a shopworn image is the best way to convey an idea, a classic writer can keep his reader engaged by remembering what the idiom literally refers to and playing with the image to keep it in her mind’s eye:

When Americans are told about foreign politics, their eyes glaze over.

Ever tried to explain to a New Yorker the finer points of Slovakian coalition politics? I have. He almost needed an adrenaline shot to come out of the coma.14

Electronic publication is scholarship on steroids. With electronic publication, you can see your stuff published just 15 seconds after you write it. It’s scholarship on methamphetamines. Publication for speed freaks.15

Trying to direct team owners is like herding cats. To suggest that directing team owners is like herding cats is to give cats a bad name.16

Hobbes stripped the human personality for any capacity for love or tenderness or even simple fellow-feeling, leaving instead only fear. He threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Hobbes stripped the human personality for any capacity for love or tenderness or even simple fellow-feeling, leaving instead only fear. The bath was dry, and the baby had vanished.17

And if you must use a cliché, why not word it in a way that makes physical sense? When you think about it, the fate of an overlooked item is to fall through or into the cracks, not between them, and the prototypical unrealizable desire is to eat your cake and have it, not to have your cake and eat it (it’s easy to do them in that order). And you’ll often be surprised, and your writing will be livelier, if you take a few seconds to look up the original wording of a cliché. To gild the lily is not just tired but visually less apt than either of the original metaphors that it scrambles together (from Shakespeare’s King John), to paint the lily and to gild refined gold, the latter of which neatly echoes the visual redundancy in the overlap in sound between gild and gold. For that matter, you could avoid cliché altogether by adapting one of the other images in the full sentence: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”

Thoughtless clichés can even be dangerous. I sometimes wonder how much irrationality in the world has been excused by the nonsensical saying “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” a corruption of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark about “a foolish consistency.” Recently a White House official referred to the American Israel Political Affairs Committee as “the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” confusing the elephant in the room (something that everyone pretends to ignore) with an 800- pound gorilla (something that is powerful enough to do whatever it wants, from the joke “Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?”). Given the controversy over whether the Israel lobby is merely undernoticed in American foreign policy or nefariously all-controlling, the meaning of the first cliché

is a commonplace; the meaning of the second, incendiary. Though no writer can avoid idioms altogether—they’re part of the English lexicon, just like

individual words—good writers reach for fresh similes and metaphors that keep the reader’s sensory cortexes lit up. Shakespeare advises against “adding another hue unto the rainbow”; Dickens describes a man “with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else”; Nabokov has Lolita plopping into a seat, “her legs splayed, starfish-style.”18 But you don’t have to be a great fiction writer to engage a reader’s mental imagery. A psychologist explains a computer simulation in which activation builds up in a neuron until it fires “like popcorn in a pan.”19 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.”20 Even the bassist of the fictional rock band Spinal Tap deserves our admiration, if not for his literary acumen then for his attention to imagery, when he told an interviewer: “We’re very lucky in the band in that we have two distinct visionaries, David and Nigel; they’re like poets, like Shelley and Byron. … It’s like fire and ice, basically. I feel my role in the band is to be somewhere in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.”

In classic prose the writer is directing the gaze of the reader to something in the world she can see for herself. All eyes are on an agent: a protagonist, a mover and shaker, a driving force. The agent pushes or prods something, and it moves or changes. Or something interesting comes into view, and the reader examines it part by part. Classic style minimizes abstractions, which cannot be seen with the naked eye. This doesn’t mean that it avoids abstract subject matter (remember Brian Greene’s explanation of the multiverse), only that it shows the events making up that subject matter transparently, by narrating an unfolding plot with real characters doing things, rather than by naming an abstract concept that encapsulates those events in a single word. Look at the stuffy passages on the left, which are filled with abstract nouns (underlined), and compare them with the more direct versions on the right:

The researchers found that groups that are typically associated with low alcoholism levels actually have moderate amounts of alcohol intake, yet still have low levels of high intake associated with alcoholism, such as Jews.

The researchers found that in groups with little alcoholism, such as Jews, people actually drink moderate amounts of alcohol, but few of them drink too much and become alcoholics.

I have serious doubts that trying to amend the Constitution would work on an actual level. On the aspirational level, however, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable.

I doubt that trying to amend the Constitution would actually succeed, but it may be valuable to aspire to it.

Individuals with mental health issues can become dangerous. It is important to approach this subject from a variety of strategies, including mental health assistance but also from a law enforcement perspective.

People who are mentally ill can become dangerous. We need to consult mental health professionals, but we also may have to inform the police.

What are the prospects for reconciling a prejudice reduction model of change, designed to get people to like one another more, with a collective action model of change, designed to ignite struggles to achieve intergroup equality?

Should we try to change society by reducing prejudice, that is, by getting people to like one another? Or should we encourage disadvantaged groups to struggle for equality through collective action? Or can we do both?

Could you recognize a “level” or a “perspective” if you met one on the street? Could you point it out to someone else? What about an approach, an assumption, a concept, a condition, a context, a framework, an issue, a model, a process, a range, a role, a strategy, a tendency, or a variable? These are metaconcepts: concepts about concepts. They serve as a kind of packing material in which academics, bureaucrats, and corporate mouthpieces clad their subject matter. Only when the packaging is hacked away does the object come into view. The phrase on the aspirational level adds nothing to aspire, nor is a prejudice reduction model any more sophisticated than reducing prejudice. Recall that the winning sentence in the 1998 Bad Writing Contest consisted almost entirely of metaconcepts.

Together with verbal coffins like model and level in which writers entomb their actors and actions, the English language provides them with a dangerous weapon called nominalization: making something into a noun. The nominalization rule takes a perfectly spry verb and embalms it into a lifeless noun by adding a suffix like –ance, –ment, –ation, or –ing. Instead of affirming an idea, you effect its affirmation; rather than postponing something, you implement a postponement. The writing scholar Helen Sword calls them zombie nouns because they lumber across the scene without a conscious agent directing their motion.21 They can turn prose into a night of the living dead:

Prevention of neurogenesis diminished social avoidance. When we prevented neurogenesis, the mice no longer avoided other mice.

Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.

We presented participants with a sentence, followed by the word TRUE or FALSE.

Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria. We excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.

It may be that some missing genes are more contributive to the spatial deficit.

Perhaps some missing genes contribute to the spatial deficit.

The last example shows that verbs can be drained of life when they are turned into adjectives, too, as when contribute becomes contributive to or aspire becomes on the aspirational level. As this cartoon by Tom Toles suggests, zombie nouns and adjectives are one of the signatures of academese:

Toles © the Washington post. Reprinted with permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.

Any interrogatory verbalizations? But it’s not just academics who loose these zombies on the world. In response to a hurricane which threatened the Republican National Convention in 2012, Florida governor Rick Scott told the press, “There is not any anticipation there will be a cancellation,” that is, he didn’t anticipate that he would have to cancel the convention. And in 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “The president is desirous of trying to see how we can make our efforts in order to find a way to facilitate,” to wit, the president wanted to help. Once again the professional habit has not gone unnoticed by satirists, such as in the MacNelly cartoon on the next page, which appeared when Alexander Haig, the notoriously creative suffixer who served as secretary of state in the Reagan administration, resigned from his post:

When a grammatical construction is associated with politicians you can be sure that it provides a way to evade responsibility. Zombie nouns, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That is what they have in common with the passive constructions that also bog down these examples, like was affirmed and were used. And in a third evasive maneuver, many students and politicians stay away from the pronouns I, me, and you. The social psychologist Gordon Allport called out these tactics in an “Epistle to Thesis Writers”:

Your anxiety and feeling of insecurity will tempt you to an excessive use of the passive voice:

On the basis of the analysis which was made of the data which were collected, it is suggested that the null hypothesis can be rejected.

Please, sir; I didn’t do it! It was done! Try to conquer your cowardice, and start your concluding chapter with the creative assertion: Lo! I found …

You may attempt to defend your enervating use of the passive voice by pointing out that the only alternative is excessive reliance upon the first person personal pronoun or upon the pontifical We. It is safer, you conclude, to choose self- effacement at this critical moment in your career. I reply: even in critical moments I see no harm in saying I if I mean I.22

Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful. They simulate a conversation, as classic style recommends, and they are gifts to the memory-challenged reader. It takes a good deal of mental effort to keep track of a cast of characters identified as hes, shes, and theys. But unless one is in the throes of a meditative trance or an ecstatic rapture, one never loses track of oneself or of the person one is addressing (I, we, you). That’s why guidelines on how to avoid legalese and other turbid professional styles call for using first- and second-person pronouns,

inverting passives into actives, and letting verbs be verbs rather than zombie nouns. Here are some examples of discouraged and recommended wordings from the Pennsylvania Plain Language Consumer Contract Act:

If the Buyer defaults and the Seller commences collection through an attorney, the Buyer will be liable for attorney’s fees.

If the Buyer is behind in making payments, the Seller may:

1. Hire an attorney to collect the money. 2. Charge the Buyer for the attorney’s fees.

If the outstanding balance is prepaid in full, the unearned finance charge will be refunded.

If I pay the whole amount before the due date, you will refund the unearned portion of the finance charge.

The Buyer is obligated to make all payments hereunder. I will make all payments as they become due.

Membership fees paid prior to the opening of the club will be placed in trust.

If I pay membership fees before the club opens, the club will put the money in a trust account.23

A concrete and conversational style does more than make professional verbiage easier to read; it can be a matter of life and death. Take this warning sticker on a portable generator:

Mild Exposure to CO can result in accumulated damage over time. Extreme Exposure to CO may rapidly be fatal without producing significant warning symptoms. Infants, children, older adults, and people with health conditions are more easily affected by Carbon Monoxide and their symptoms are more severe.

It’s in the third person, and filled with zombie nouns like Extreme Exposure and passives like are more easily affected. People can read it and not get the feeling that anything terrible will happen. Perhaps as a result, every year more than a hundred Americans inadvertently turn their homes into gas chambers and execute themselves and their families by running generators and combustion heaters indoors. Much better is this sticker found on a recent model:

Using a generator indoors CAN KILL YOU IN MINUTES. Generator exhaust contains carbon monoxide. This is a poison you cannot see or smell. NEVER use inside a home or garage, EVEN IF doors and windows are open. Only use OUTSIDE and far away from windows, doors, and vents.

In this sticker a concrete verb in the active voice and the use of the second person narrate a concrete event: if you do this, it can kill you. And what is intended as a warning is expressed in the imperative (Never use inside), just as one would do in a conversation, rather than as an impersonal generalization (Mild Exposure can result in damage).

The advice to bring zombie nouns back to life as verbs and to convert passives into actives is ubiquitous in style guides and plain language laws. For the reasons we’ve just seen, it’s often good advice. But it’s good advice only when a writer or an editor understands why it’s being offered. No English construction could have survived in the language for a millennium and a half unless it had continued to serve some purpose, and that includes passives and nominalizations. They may be overused, and often they are badly used, but that does not mean they should not be used at all. Nominalizations, as we will see in chapter 5, can be useful in connecting a sentence to those that came before, keeping the passage coherent. The passive voice, too, has several uses in English. One

of them (I’ll take up the others in chapters 4 and 5) is indispensable to classic style: the passive allows the writer to direct the reader’s gaze, like a cinematographer choosing the best camera angle.

Often a writer needs to steer the reader’s attention away from the agent of an action. The passive allows him to do so because the agent can be left unmentioned, which is impossible in the active voice. You can say Pooh ate the honey (active voice, actor mentioned), The honey was eaten by Pooh (passive voice, actor mentioned), or The honey was eaten (passive voice, actor unmentioned) —but not Ate the honey (active voice, actor unmentioned). Sometimes the omission is ethically questionable, as when the sidestepping politician admits only that “mistakes were made,” omitting the phrase with by that would identify who made those mistakes. But sometimes the ability to omit an agent comes in handy because the minor characters in the story are a distraction. As the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has noted, there is nothing wrong with a news report that uses the passive voice to say, “Helicopters were flown in to put out the fires.”24 The reader does not need to be informed that a guy named Bob was flying one of the helicopters.

Even when both the actor and the target of an action are visible in the scene, the choice of the active or passive voice allows the writer to keep the reader focused on one of those characters before pointing out an interesting fact involving that character. That’s because the reader’s attention usually starts out on the entity named by the subject of the sentence. Actives and passives differ in which character gets to be the subject, and hence which starts out in the reader’s mental spotlight. An active construction trains the reader’s gaze on someone who is doing something: See that lady with the shopping bag? She’s pelting a mime with zucchini. The passive trains the reader’s gaze on someone who’s having something done to him: See that mime? He’s being pelted with zucchini by the lady with the shopping bag. Using the wrong voice can make the reader crane back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match: See that lady with the shopping bag? A mime is being pelted with zucchini by her.

The problem with the passives that bog down bureaucratic and academic prose is that they are not selected with these purposes in mind. They are symptoms of absent-mindedness in a writer who has forgotten that he should be staging an event for the reader. He knows how the story turned out, so he just describes the outcome (something was done). But the reader, with no agent in sight, has no way to visualize the event being moved forward by its instigator. She is forced to imagine an effect without a cause, which is as hard to visualize as Lewis Carroll’s grin without a cat.

In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don’ts. But it’s better to keep in mind the guiding metaphor of classic style: a writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader’s gaze to something in the world. Each of the don’ts corresponds to a way in which a writer can stray from this scenario.

Classic style is not the only way to write. But it’s an ideal that can pull writers away from many of their worst habits, and it works particularly well because it makes the unnatural act of writing seem

like two of our most natural acts: talking and seeing.