Robert Fulford: How to avoid sounding like a bureaucrat

As a former bureaucrat who constantly struggles against my decades in government writing and tries to write more plainly and clearly, enjoyed this piece by Robert Fulford on Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century:

Pinker advocates what he calls “classic style,” a combination of inventiveness, good manners and the awareness of a reader’s needs. In the classic style, the writer pretends to speak conversationally to a single person. But this works only if the writer can overcome the main obstacle to clear prose: “The difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.”

The opposite of classic style is jargon, a language that’s terrifyingly easy to learn. A bright graduate student can produce bales of it without breaking a sweat. There are those who believe scholars use jargon to hide their lack of something to say or to protect their status in a priestly class. Pinker argues otherwise. Many scholars have nothing to hide and no need to impress, he says. He finds them “honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks.”

Pinker’s research in linguistics has taught him to respect the human “hunger for coherence” and specific easy-to-imagine words. The classic style calls for prose that all of us can follow. Readers need to see the connector between the first sentence and the second, between the second and the third. Working on this book, Pinker came to a fresh understanding of connective words, like “but, despite, because, even so, however.” He calls them the cement of reason, “unsung heroes of lucid prose.” (“Cement of reason” is a Pinker-approved phrase.)

He’s full of helpful advice, based on the study of mental processes — including one rule that I’m centuries late in learning: When setting down a series of ideas, “Save the heaviest for last.” He quotes a famous Scottish prayer that used the proper order by asking for deliverance from “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.” Research shows that it’s hard to absorb a series of small details while holding in memory a big one.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” gets it right, as does “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!” Pinker tells us that light-before-heavy is an ancient principle in linguistics, discovered by a Sanskrit grammarian in the fourth century BCE.

Robert Fulford: How to avoid sounding like a bureaucrat