Style: What is it? No matter how hard I strive to achieve a sense of style in my writing, it seems to be so close yet remain just outside my grasp. Therefore I grasped eagerly Steven Pinker’s ‘Sense of Style’; finally someone who could go deeper than listing punctuation rules and word usage guidelines. Over the time I have seen many of those and, apart from keeping my punctuation straight, learned very little about style.
Wordiness has never been my problem, I think, but rather the opposite. Especially in my professional writing I, like everybody else, will skip details that are unimportant for me. Pinker calls this the Curse of Knowledge: We are unable to imagine how it is like for someone else who doesn’t know what we know. Therefore we do not provide all the necessary details or steps for the reader to understand what we mean. When I wrote instructions for computer system’s users, I had some users to read them before publishing and tell me what they didn’t understand. The Curse works in fiction as well; the story is in my head so I need to give the reader enough clues to construct a similar image in their mind.
Pinker explains how people process language, which resembles a computer algorithm. Our thoughts or ideas need to be encoded in language that flows from left to right on paper, when they want naturally to branch off in different directions. The reader must in turn store parts of the sentence in short term memory until a part later in the sentence will make the whole understandable. For example in taking in the sentence, “My father, who is an architect, lives in Oulu”, you need to store ‘My father’ and ‘who lives in Oulu’ before you reach ‘lives in Oulu’ can parse the whole as “My father lives in Oulu. He is an architect.”
The lesson? Long and tortuous sentences can, and often will cause serious damage to your style. Like Jean Cocteau wrote in Le Rappel à l’ordre:
“What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.”
On the other hand, it would be equally bad should I go to the other extreme and sacrifice rhythm and variety for simplicity. Sometimes change of pace or order can enhance the prose and make the meaning clearer. Professor Strunk advices us that a sentence should contain no unnecessary words, but Professor Pinker reminds us that all words are not unnecessary, though they may add nothing to the meaning—nor did Strunk mean his advice to be followed to the letter.
Perhaps this is what I need to take in heart from all the advice that Pinker gives in his book: You need to understand how the language works, and why the different rules exist, to be able to use them with anything resembling style. Still, I have a feeling that all that I have learned so far is just the first layer of many, and the meaning of style keeps eluding me.
