* ‘Word of Mouth’ (BBC Radio 4), http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075pz7x
* Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (New York, 2014)

There was another choice episode of ‘Word of Mouth’ this week. The guest was Steven Pinker (Psychology, Harvard), author of several important books on language and thought, and also of The Better Angels of our Nature, for which I have a soft spot because (i) its argument that the human race is improving its behaviour, and (ii) its suggestion that improved empathy as a result of reading literature may have something to do with that, both suit my optimistic book-based outlook rather well.

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Some of the discussion focused on Pinker’s recent book The Sense of Style, which I hadn’t read. Well, I have now. I think it works well to approach a writing-style manual from the perspective of a psychologist. There’s an additional sense of purpose behind the technical advice, a set of reasons why the reader’s mind is best addressed in particular ways. I would have liked more detail on the science and its consequences for writing and reading, but the point is to set up a more general psychological framework in which clear and cogent writing can be explained. I will be recommending the book to lots of my students.

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Pinker seems to me to be very sure-footed when dealing with lots of detailed technical issues. He finds good — and different — reasons for holding the line here, giving a little there. There was, though, one section where I rebelled. Passages from Fredric Jameson and Judith Butler are held up as instances of obscurity and thus stylistic failure, clarity being the key principle. However, the many devotees of these authors relish the challenge of interacting with complex ideas, enjoying the encounter with non-straightforward things. In the kind of writing Jameson and Butler are doing, clarity isn’t the key principle exactly.
      I thought about chasing up Pinker’s counter-example, a paragon of clarity, Brian Greene’s writings about string theory and multiverses. The passages quoted are fine, but I fancied my chances of picking out something relatively opaque. String theory, after all, inasmuch as I understand it, doesn’t lend itself to subject-verb-object simplicity. However, I decided not to, as it seemed a rather uncharitable mission, and not the best way to make the point that I didn’t see much value in an unnecessary swipe at the difficulty of Theory.