Sense of Style - Chapter 2

Sense of Style - Chapter 2

Speaking Vs Writing

Speaking

• Writing is an unnatural act. As Charles Darwin observed, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak”
• Speaking and writing involve very different kinds of human relationship,
• Spoken conversation is instinctive because social interaction is instinctive:
• When we engage our conversational partners, we have an inkling of what they know and what they might be interested in
• 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.

Writing

• The recipients are invisible and inscrutable, without knowing much about them or seeing their reactions.
• 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,
• clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.

Classic Style

• 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,

• 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.

• 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; h

• 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 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 In practical style, the writer and reader have defined roles

• Writing in practical style may conform to a fixed template

• 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

• 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 similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise.

• 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

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius.

• 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.

• And for all its directness, classic style remains a pretense, an imposture, a stance.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• They unthinkingly follow the advice to say what you’re going to say, say it, and then say what you’ve said 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.

• 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

• Good writing takes advantage of a reader’s expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey,

• 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 we no longer have to refer to paragraphs “demonstrating” some things and sections “summarizing” other things

• 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.

• As for the advice to say what you said, the key is the expression “in other words.”

• Metadiscourse is not the only form of self-consciousness that bogs down professional prose.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.”

• It’s not that good writers never hedge their claims. It’s that their hedging is a choice, not a tic.

• it’s more reassuring to hear Not Jones; he’s an honest man than Not Jones; he’s a very honest man

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

• How to avoid legalese and other turbid professional styles call for using firstand second-person pronouns, inverting passives into actives, and letting verbs be verbs rather than zombie nouns.

• It’s in the third person, and filled with zombie nouns like Extreme Exposure and passives like are more easily affected.

• 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. N

• 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).

• 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

• 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.

• 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.