The science writer applies evolutionary psychology to the question of why so much writing is so bad and how we might make it better.

STEVEN PINKER, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; Author, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

Bad writing is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to evade responsibility; pseudointellectuals try to bamboozle their readers with highfalutin gobbledygook, making up for the fact that they have nothing to say. Well, I don’t doubt that the bamboozlement theory is true for some writers some of the time, but in my experience it doesn’t ring true. Good people can write bad prose. I know many scientists and scholars who do groundbreaking research on important topics, who have nothing to hide and no reason to impress. Still, their writing stinks.

The second most popular theory is that it is digital media that is ruining language. Google is making us stupid. The digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future. Well, if the “dumbest generation” theory were true, then that would have an obvious implication, namely that it was all better before the digital age, before the rise of smart phones and Twitter and emailing, say, in the 1980s. Now, many of you remember what life was like back in the 1980s. Wasn’t it great back then, when teenagers spoke in articulate paragraphs? And bureaucrats wrote in plain language? And every academic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay?

Of course, bad writing has burdened people in every generation, and my favorite theory comes from an observation from Charles Darwin, who wrote, “man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write.” Speech is instinctive, but writing is, and always has been, hard. The readers are unknown, invisible, inscrutable. They exist only in the writer’s imagination. They can’t react if the prose is unclear, or break in and ask for clarification. And so writing, above all, is an act of pretense, and writing is an act of craftsmanship.

Writing is an unnatural act, and good style, above all, requires a coherent mental model of the communication scenario: how does the writer imagine his relation to the reader, and what is the writer trying to accomplish? My favorite theory of this understanding of the writing situation comes from a book called Clear and Simple as the Truth by a pair of English scholars, Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner. They call this model classic style. In classic style, prose is a window onto the world. The writer has seen something in the world and he positions the reader so she can see it with her own eyes. The reader and writer are equals; the goal is to help the reader see objective reality, and the style is conversation.

Classic prose keeps up the illusion that the reader is seeing the world rather than just listening to verbiage. The problem with the kind of writer who just slings around one cliché after another is that he either forces the reader to turn off her visual brain, or if she goes through the effort of treating his words seriously, she will inevitably trip over the ludicrous imagery that a writer of clichés will get himself into.

Classic prose narrates ongoing events; we see agents performing actions that affect objects. Non-classic prose “thingifys” events and then refers to the thing using a dangerous tool of English grammar called nominalization, making something into a noun. Nominalization will take a perfectly spry verb and entomb it with a suffix to turn it into a noun, so instead of competing, you engage in competition; instead of organizing something, you bring about the organization of it.

For many years, portable generators would carry the following warning language: “Mild exposure to CO2 can result in accumulated damage over time. Extreme exposure to CO2 may rapidly be fatal without producing significant warning symptoms.” And as a result, hundreds of Americans would asphyxiate themselves and their families by running portable generators indoors, until they changed the wording to read: “Using a generator indoors can kill you in minutes.” So classic prose can be a matter of life and death. Literally.

Why is it so hard for writers to use the resources of English to convey ideas effectively? The best explanation, I think, is a psychological phenomenon called the curse of knowledge: the fact that when you know something, it is extraordinarily hard to imagine what it is like for someone not to know it. If an adult knows a word, they assume that everyone knows it. If they know a fact, they assume that everyone else knows it. I believe that the curse of knowledge is the chief contributor to opaque writing. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that the readers haven’t learned the jargon, haven’t learned the intermediate steps [that] seemed too obvious to mention and can’t visualize a scene currently in the writer’s mind’s eye that seems as clear as day. The writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon or spell out the logic or supply the concrete details, even when writing for professional peers.

Finally, how should we think about correct usage—about what is correct, incorrect, right, wrong? It’s a set of issues that arouses more interest than all of the other components of writing put together. Some usages are clearly wrong. When Cookie Monster says, “Me want cookie,” the reason that even a four-year-old child will laugh is that the child knows that Cookie Monster has made a grammatical error. But other alleged errors of grammar are not so clear. Here we see a Democratic president, Bill Clinton who, when he was running for office in 1992, had as one of his campaign slogans “Give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back.” Many purists would claim that this is a grammatical error—it should be “Al Gore and me.” “To boldly go where no man has gone before”—there are English teachers who would say that Captain Kirk made an error, the so-called split infinitive.

These contested usages have given rise to what journalists sometimes call the “language war” between the “prescriptivists” and the “descriptivists.” According to this story, prescriptivists are those who prescribe to how people ought to speak and write, according to whom the rules of usage are objectively correct. To obey them is to uphold standards of excellence; to flout them is to dumb down literate culture, degrade the language and hasten the decline of civilization. On the other side, we have the descriptivists, who describe how people do speak, according to whom rules of usage are just the secret handshake of the ruling class.  Although the language war is a perennial favorite of journalists looking for a column in a can, I think there are reasons to believe that it is a pseudo-controversy.

Language changes; new words come in; they are inevitably perceived as jargon, slang, neologisms. Some of them earn their keep and get a toehold in the language – the speakers who objected to them die; they’re replaced by their children, who wonder what all the fuss was about.

So how do you distinguish the legitimate rules of usage from the bogus ones? The answer is unbelievably simple: look them up. If you go to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, what it will say is, “it’s all right to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity.” Since clarity is the usual reason for splitting, this advice means merely that you can split them whenever you want to! Modern dictionaries and style manuals do not ratify pet peeves, or grammatical folklore, or bogus rules, because their advice is based on evidence and on English as it is actually used by careful and exemplary writers. I do think it is important for a writer to know what the rules are and to follow them, but they’re the least important part of good writing. They pale in significance behind classic style, coherent ordering of ideals and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of factual diligence and coherent content, ideas and arguments. And even the most irksome errors are not signs of the decline of language, to say nothing of civilization.