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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 10 500 , 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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.”
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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:
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:
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 he s, she s, and they s. 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:
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.
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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.