Q&A: Steven Pinker

When it comes to writing about writing, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker is a triple threat: a researcher of the mind, an expert on the workings of language, and a wordsmith in his own right. In The Sense of Style, the Harvard professor takes the reins from style mavens like Strunk and White—not only proposing rules for clearer expression, but also explaining why they work.

How does cognitive science point the way to better writing?

Many branches of cognitive psychology have discovered that it’s extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what another person knows or doesn’t know. As a result, writers assume too much, use jargon and abbreviations that their readers have no way of deciphering, fail to present background information that’s critical to understanding the passage, and describe things at too high a level of abstraction. I use the term “curse of knowledge,” but it goes by many names. I think it is the main impediment to clear writing.

Why is abstraction a problem?

We have reason to believe that our brain evolved to think of physical objects, in locations, being acted upon by agents. As we become more familiar with a domain, we think about things more and more abstractly. So we tend to write at an abstract level, baffling our readers as to what’s going on. You have to show a draft to a real specimen of your readers and probe what this person does and doesn’t understand.

You take pains to offer reasons for your advice. Is this an important part of your approach?

It’s the entire rationale of the approach. The problem with traditional style guides is that they present advice as dogmatic dictates, and so a writer has no way of appreciating why and when the rules contribute to good writing—and therefore is likely to apply them robotically and to misapply them. One can obey every rule and every stylebook ever published and still be a horrendous writer if one doesn’t understand what one is trying to accomplish.

Is there one piece of advice that you consider most important?

Revise with specific attention to the quality of the writing. It’s too cognitively demanding to assemble a coherent argument and to express it clearly at the same time. The order in which thoughts occur to you is not the order in which they are most easily assimilated by a reader. For the vast majority, this requires an entirely separate process. I think many writers, especially academics, just don’t even bother. They shovel out passages of prose and then hit “Send” without going over the prose and thinking to themselves, OK, how can I make this clearer to my beleaguered readers?

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