Since I started writing professionally three years ago, I’ve read dozens of books, style guides, and advice columns on how to write well. Out of all these, The Sense of Style is the only writing guide I can unreservedly recommend. It’s the one book that has actually made me a better writer. Reading it has paid me even higher dividends than a writing course I once bought for $700.
So, if you asked me for my two cents on how to write well, I’d rather keep my two cents and give you ten dollars so you can buy a copy of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style.
The only problem is that I can’t afford to give you ten dollars because I’m still trying to recover from purchasing that writing course. So instead, I thought I’d share something that’s within my budget: four condensed lessons from The Sense of Style that have palpably leveled up my craft. I may still be far from being a perfect writer, but these lessons have shown me the steps to get there.
1. The Difference Between Good and Bad Writing
The most elementary lesson I learned from The Sense of Style is that writing is fundamentally unnatural. Good writing is aware of this, while bad writing is delusional about it.
Why is writing unnatural? Well, writing is a relatively recent addition to the toolkit of human communication. The way we write and read today only took off with the invention of the printing press in 1440. To be fair, the earliest human writings can be traced back some 20,000 years — but that’s only a microscopic grain in the humongous hourglass of language, especially when you consider that speech has been around for millions of years.
We’re wired to speak, not to write.
It’s no surprise, then, that children effortlessly yawp their first sounds (and even smear their first paintings), whereas they must endure years of writing drills before they can pen down a story about their summer holidays. And let’s not get started on dissertations, novels, and other wickedly wordy beasts. All of which is to say that an entire lifetime is not enough to master the craft of writing.
Since writing is unnatural, it poses many great challenges that would never arise during spoken conversations. When we write, we slam words against a brick wall — without getting any reaction. We can’t see another person’s eyebrows arching in disbelief, we can’t see their eyes widening, and we can’t hear a reassuring “hm” or “aha.” We usually don’t even know who we’re talking to. So, our primary challenge as writers is to act as if we’re talking to someone, even though a writing environment suggests the complete opposite.
“Writing,” says Pinker in The Sense of Style, “is above all an act of pretense.” What this pretense asks us to do is to perform witchcraft: we must imagine ourselves in a conversation with a dreamed-up person, also known as the reader.
As we’ll see, there are different ways to do this, and (spoiler alert) none of them is The Right Way™. But what marks good writing, at bottom, is when an author understands two things: (a) that they’re navigating a make-believe world and (b) that they must shape this world depending on their context and message. As Pinker puts it in The Sense of Style:
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.
Right now, I’m creating the make-believe world in which you and I are having a conversation about writing. (This conversationalist style is also known as classic style.) However, if I were to write this as a manifesto, I’d try to win you for my cause, and thus, I’d have to choose different linguistic weaponry, like: “Don’t let bad writing exploit you! You can do better! Writers, unite!” (Yeah, I should probably stick with writing blog posts…)
How can writers engage their readers in conversation? One guiding metaphor, according to Pinker, is to create “a window onto the world.” Through that window, the writer points to concrete things. If writing succeeds, the reader can see these things for themselves, which makes the reader feel clever. Conversely, bad writing confuses the reader and makes them feel dull.
So, writers point things out — it sounds simple enough. And yet, after three years of writing almost daily, I still receive bewildered comments from professors and editors. Writing is unnatural. Writing is hard.
However, just a few guidelines from The Sense of Style can make writing feel less difficult. And they all build on the same foundation: treat writing like a conversation.
Bad writing announces itself; good writing just says it
The following section is about meta-discourse. First, a definition of meta-discourse will be provided. This will be followed by examples of —
Yawn.
I’m willing to bet that you didn’t enjoy those tedious sentences. And yet, they’re the daily bread for many writers, particularly in the spheres of science. Linguists call it meta-discourse. It’s when writers reflect on their text within the text, and it’s painful because it fills the page without moving the story forward.
As Pinker says in The Sense of Style:
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.
In most cases, you can happily discard meta-discourse. After all, one advantage writing has over face-to-face conversations is that readers can bounce around passages. They can always go back and jump ahead.
Of course, meta-discourse is necessary to some degree. Sometimes, we must take the reader by their hand when we introduce new topics, shift the focus, or recap an important point. In these cases, Pinker advises to redirect the reader’s gaze by asking them a question.
What else can we do when meta-discourse is inevitable?
Metaphors around vision work well. Since conversational style is all about pointing things out, phrases like let’s look at, as we’ve seen, or as we’ll see feel natural to the reader. Similarly, using the pronoun we invites the reader to participate in the spectacle of the text (e.g., we have explored that, now we arrive).
But, as we’ve seen, all writers should wield the weapon of meta-discourse with care.
The same advice applies to other meta-ramblings, like meta-concepts. I’m particularly guilty of this. For instance, here are a few empty words that I constantly try to scratch from my writing: levels, perspectives, approaches, frameworks, strategies. All these terms are concepts about concepts. They talk about hypothetical ideas rather than concrete objects, and thus, they can confuse the reader. I’ve also found that they make my writing sound like a business meeting, which readers find more repulsive than smelly cheese that’s molding in the back of a fridge.
So, don’t fool yourself when you hear a verbose phrase like “implementing a writing improvement strategy.” It’s just a more bulky version of “improving writing.”
Bad writing is self-conscious; good writing is bold
For many writers, one highly common strategy is CYA, Cover Your Ass. They’ll tend to use quite vague hedges like almost, nearly, presumably, rather, sort of because they’re held back by their self-consciousness, which is why their writing is littered with unnecessary passive voice.
As you can judge by the previous paragraph, I’ve been guilty of CYA. This is because I fear that evil readers could send me long emails in which they expose all my inaccuracies. Cushioning my writing with thick pads of fluff helps me sleep at night.
However, The Sense of Style has helped me abstain from CYA. And as I found out, there’s a better alternative: So Sue Me (SSM). The idea of SSM is that writers can expect the same amount of charity and goodwill from their readers as in spoken conversations. Let’s assume I say to a friend, “It’s a sunny day!” even though it briefly rained earlier that day. Do I need to clarify that it’s a somewhat sunny day? No — I can expect that my friend understands what I’m trying to say: “All things being equal, it’s a sunny day.”
Of course, some writing needs safety nets and fail-saves. Sometimes, their absence can seriously affect a statement’s consequences and overly distort reality. For instance:
- Distorted: “Men are angrier than women”
- More accurate: “On average, men are more likely to express their anger more often than women do.”
The point is, good writers use hedges intentionally, not compulsively.
One more rule I found helpful: Whenever you use intensifiers like “very,” replace them with “damn” (or a more appropriate swear word). Then, check if the intensity is justified. From my experience, many intensifiers are fucking overused.
Bad writing creates zombies; good writing kills them
I need to warn you. Undead words are approaching.
The rise of using verbs as nouns leads to a limitation of understanding, a reduction of attention, and a zombification of language. A similar phenomenon is contributive to sapping the life force of adjectives.
Yikes.
When writers shoot up verbs with nouns and adjectives, they create zombie words. For instance, to limit becomes to lead to a limitation. Contributes becomes is contributive. These ghastly creatures don’t just look ugly. Zombie words also sound dead because they turn the sentence into a tedious third-person narrative of passive entities. As a result, the sentence shaves off the conversational pronouns that make writing so engaging: I, you, we.
Let’s cure that sentence above from its infection:
- Zombie: The rise of using verbs as nouns leads to a blockade of understanding, a reduction of attention, and a zombification of language.
- Non-zombie: The more I use verbs as nouns, the more I limit your understanding, reduce your attention, and zombify language.
It’s scary how many writers (myself included) transform their texts into a Night of the Living Dead. And I don’t mean this as a joke. In certain scenarios, zombie language can actually be a matter of life and death. Here are two sentences that Pinker took from the warning stickers of two generators:
- Generator 1: “Mild Exposure to CO can result in accumulated damage over time. Extreme Exposure to CO may rapidly be fatal without producing significant warning symptoms.”
- Generator 2: “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.”
I don’t think I would read the first generator’s label before using it, let alone understand it. Zombie language doesn’t just kill words; it can also kill people.
So, let’s aspire to write like the living. Let’s use verbs and pronouns.
2. The Curse of Knowledge: Why Smart People Write Poor Prose
The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows.
— Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
I recently wrote an article about how music soothes loneliness. While writing the article, I had what seemed to me like an ingenious idea: I wanted to structure the article like a playlist, a series of songs and sounds. For instance, I called the table of contents “Tracklist.” Then, I called the headlines “Track 1,” “Interlude,” and “Outro.” That way, the article itself could work as music and thus soothe the reader’s loneliness.
Or so I thought.
When I sent the article to my editor, he wasn’t amused. “I’m confused,” he commented on three different sections. “What are you trying to do?”
This seemed outlandish to me. How could he be confused when it all seemed so clear and clever to me? But then, it slowly dawned on me that I had been afflicted by an all-to-common spell of bad prose: the curse of knowledge.
The curse of knowledge, according to Pinker, is defined as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.” Make no mistake: all writers are cursed. Not because they’re evil but because they’re human. Assuming that others know what you know is ingrained in our psychology. When you show a toddler a box with a plush bear that only they can see, the toddler will then assume that another person also knows there’s a plush bear inside the box. Similarly, we assume that others should know how we feel when, really, our emotions are often opaque to the outside.
How can we exorcise the curse of knowledge? Pinker says that anyone who wants to lift the curse of knowledge “must first appreciate what a devilish curse it is.” But common advice like imagining the reader on your shoulder won’t do the trick. We must remember the specific pitfalls that have cursed us in the first place. Here are two of them.
Counterspell 1: Jettison jargon
When I started studying philosophy, I was shocked by the overwhelming number of Latin jargon in my readings. Ceteris paribus, a fortiori, ad rem, de dicto, explanans — the list is so long, it’s absurdum. To be fair, these expressions have become part of philosophy, just like other jargon has become part of other fields of science. And to some degree, this makes sense. Jargon shortcuts long-winded explanations of ideas. It helps experts communicate effectively.
But that’s precisely the problem. Using jargon is a self-perpetuating cycle, and writers keep spinning it because they fear that breaking the cycle will appear barbaric and unsophisticated to their clique.
Not so. Trading jargon with plain English makes any text more accessible — and no less scientific. “A surprising amount of jargon,” Pinker says, “can simply be banished and no one will be the worse for it.”
In my philosophy essays, I’ve since tried replacing all my Latin phrases with their English counterparts. I might feel less like a modern incarnation of Descartes, but I’m confident that my readers will thank me for it. Ceteris paribusbecomes other things being equal. A fortiori becomes thus it must follow that.
Bottom line: jettison — ahem — ditch your jargon. If you can’t avoid jargon, explain it in a few simple words. And if you truly want to win over your readers, add two examples. Why two? “Because,” Pinker says. “they allow the reader to triangulate on which aspect of the example is relevant to the definition.”
This will come in handy when we talk about abstractions next.
Counterspell 2: Avoid abstractions
Abstractions should be avoided — you might have come across this advice. But what does that even mean? I suppose the irony of the advice to avoid abstractions is that it’s yet another abstraction. Thus, it’s hard to grasp.
So, what is an abstraction anyway?
The key feature of abstractions is that they don’t point at something concrete in the real world. Instead, they short-circuit language by combining several layers of ideas. Take the term economy. What may appear like a simple term is harder to unpack than a Russian nesting doll. Let’s try to de-abstract the term economy:
- When I hand you a cookie and expect nothing in return, that’s called giving.
- Giving turns into trading when you give me a banana for the cookie.
- Trading turns into selling when you give me a shiny metal because you know you can sell the cookie to another person.
- When lots of people buy and sell stuff, it’s called a market.
- Activity across multiple markets is called economy.
From here, we could abstract the term economy even further by introducing terms like monetary policy. But for now, let’s just agree that we needed to climb lots of conceptual rungs on the ladder of abstraction to get from a simple term like giving to a mildly complex term like economy.
The reason we use abstractions is that they help us package complex systems into simple ideas. More importantly, they help us remember stuff. That’s why the psychologist George Miller dubbed the process behind it “chunking.” One chunk (economy) rests lighter on the mind than five chunks (giving-trading-selling-market-economy).
Here’s another example that shows the power of chunks:
I D K L M K T B H V I P.
Most people struggle to remember this sequence because each letter occupies one separate slot in their brain’s working memory. But when we chunk the sequence and transform them into well-known abbreviations, we can free up some memory.
IDK LMK TBH VIP.
Now, we only have to process four chunks instead of twelve.
The great pitfall of chunking is that we get used to the chunks of our clique. We forget that other minds might not have learned the same chunks as we did. That’s why grandparents struggle to understand their grandchildren’s lingo. YOLO, FOMO, rawdogging — these words chunk together multiple ideas, stringing them together into one slushy term.
This brings us back to the question of how we can avoid unnecessary chunks and abstractions.
One antidote is to get specific and visual. For instance, when psychologists speak of “social avoidance,” they link the term to memories from their lab: a white mouse cowering in the corner of its cage, hiding from other mice. It’s easy to forget that the average person never entered this lab, never saw the cage, never saw the mouse. And yet, we need these impressions to remember new information. We’re sensory creatures.
So, it’s worth spending the extra words to say that the lab mouse has white fur, that it always sniffs food with its pink nose, and that its poop smells like rotten beans when it avoids other mice.
Counterspell 3: Leave your mind
I am told there are writers who can tap out a coherent essay in a single pass, at most checking for typos and touching up the punctuation before sending it off for publication. You are probably not one of them.
— Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
Even with the first two counterspells, we still risk that our texts are spellbound by the curse of knowledge. The only lasting counterspell is to leave your private writing chamber, find a person from your intended audience, and hand them your draft. Only then can we begin to uncover the passages that seem obvious to us but actually perplex the average reader. That’s why professional writers have editors. Of course, not all writers can afford an editor, but even a roommate or relative can help you lift the spell.
Of course, this is easier said than done. I fear other people’s judgments about my writing. I’m also impatient. These kerfuffles further complicate the curse of knowledge. But I’ve found that the least I can do is to let my future self proofread my drafts. That is, I put every draft in my digital drawer and wait. Three days. Four days. A week. Once I forget what I wrote, I start editing.
While editing, I try to remember this quote from The Sense of Style:
The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader.
3. Garden Paths: Why Readers Get Lost in Language— and How to Rescue Them
Pinker says that every writer should know about syntax trees. They look like this:
Even though I agree with Pinker that every writer should get somewhat familiar with syntax trees, we’ll skip wading through their thick undergrowth. Instead, we’ll cut straight into an uncharted domain in writing advice: garden paths.
Here’s an example:
I waited in the doorway, still as a gargoyle.
Did you trip?
If you’re like me, you read “still” as an adverb, implying that the person continued to wait in the doorway. But the intended meaning here is “still” as an adjective, meaning that the person stood there, motionless. It’s a classic garden path: the reader got misled into a territory that was unintended by the author.
Most garden paths are only a short detour for readers. And yet, this detour is often enough to make the reader feel lost and confused. As Pinker says:
Garden paths can turn the experience of reading from an effortless glide through a sentence to a tedious two-step of little backtracks
When writers aren’t careful, they can lead readers into backyards that range anywhere from creepy to downright absurd. For example, in The Sense of Style, Pinker cites a press release by a Yale student group member. In it, they announced a “Campus-Wide Sex Week.” One item on their agenda was “A faculty panel on sex in college with four professors.”
How did you read the last sentence? Perhaps you interpreted it as a panel that discusses what it’s like to have sex with four professors. My wild guess is that this wasn’t intended — not even by a sexually liberated Yale student.
So, what can we do to unpretzel this sentence?
Pinker advises to “pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart.” Put differently, the more frequent use of a phrase is not always equivalent to its intended use. For instance, using “sex” and “with” next to each other reminds us of the common phrase “to have sex with.” But that’s not intended in this context. Instead, the intention of “with” is to describe the panel, not the sex. Once this is clear, we can clarify the phrase.
- Ambiguous: a panel on sex in college with four professors.
- Unambiguous: a panel with four professors on sex in college.
You might be thinking what I was thinking when I first learned about this: “Isn’t that a lot of effort to slightly improve a single sentence?” Believe me, when I first macheted my way through syntax trees and garden paths, I wanted to run straight back to my old, cozy writing world where everything seemed simple.
But ever since reading The Sense of Style, I’ve noticed garden paths almost daily. They made me feel like running against a window while reading. They hurt, frustrate, and, at worst, make you feel stupid. So, it’s worth putting the extra effort into crafting clean and clear sentences.
How can we sidestep garden paths and other misleading writing styles? Here are the tools from The Sense of Style I’ve found the most helpful.
Speech
Garden paths and similar ambiguities only occur in writing. Speech, in contrast, eliminates wrong turns through pauses, rhythm, and melody. I use an AI read-aloud tool to edit all of my writing and detect potential missteps. Sometimes, the answer is as simple as punctuation. (“Let’s eat grandma!” vs. “Let’s eat, grandma!”)
Signals of structure
A heap of writing advice suggests that you should cut small, unnecessary words like that, who, which, and even articles like the and a. It’s all fun and games until their absence opens up a garden path wonderland. The sentence “Fat people eat accumulates” reads much better with an extra word and a comma: “Fat which people eat, accumulates.”
Structural parallelism
In my early days of writing, I often read that I should mix up my sentence structure. You know, keep it exciting. As with all writing advice, though, this tool can turn into a dangerous weapon when wielded by unskilled hands. Here’s what I mean.
This is a sentence. This is another sentence. These sentences are written in parallel structure. But neglect this sentence because it breaks the structure by suddenly switching to the imperative mood.
So — when I’m in doubt about my sentence structure, I’d rather err on the side of sounding monotonous than confusing.
Light-before-heavy
“A big heavy phrase,” says Pinker, “is easier to handle if it comes at the end.” In other words, sorting phrases in an ascending order is candy for the human memory. For example, when you list items, try to arrange them from flimsy to bulky. Thankfully, The Declaration of Independence didn’t promise the pursuit of happiness, liberty, and life, but instead, it promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Old-before-new
Old information should come before new information. We like to read about events in the order in which they happened. The headline “Johnson Sworn In On Plane; Kennedy Is Killed By Sniper” becomes a lot clearer when it resembles the chronological order. “Kennedy Is Killed By Sniper; Johnson Sworn In On Plane.”
By the way, this also shows that the passive voice is powerful when you want to shift the attention to a key figure or neglect irrelevant actors. The active-voiced headline“Sniper Kills Kennedy; Federal Judge Swears In Johnson” would’ve bamboozled the world.
But even if a writer learns to sidestep garden paths and even if they can craft crisp and clean sentences, they’re still a long way from being a great writer.
4. Arcs of Coherence: How to Get From Good to Great
Good writers know how to write a good sentence. Great writers know how to write strings of sentences that tie into clear connections, thus weaving a larger theme.
Unfortunately, there is no step-by-step guide for architecting clear and coherent prose. But luckily, Pinker offers a few principles for constructing what he calls “arcs of coherence.”
Be clear about your topic
A reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it. As newspaper editors say: Don’t bury the lede.
— Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
This may sound obvious, but when I reflect on my own writing history, I’m terrified by how often I fail to reveal the topic from the get-go. The reason is that I want to sound clever and creative. Beginning my article with “This article is about X” seems overly amateur and simplistic to me. And perhaps it is. But the alternative is far worse: if I can’t get across my article’s topic within the first paragraph, the average reader will never even get to the point where they can marinate in the juice of my ideas.
The non-fiction books that hooked me the most were always the ones that were crystal clear about their topics. Here’s the first paragraph from one of my favorite books, How to Worry Less About Money by John Armstrong:
This book is about worries. It’s not about money troubles. There’s a crucial difference.
In three simple sentences (notice the parallel structure), Armstrong has explained what his book is about and what it’s not about (which is equally important). He even animated me to keep reading. (“What’s the difference between money worries and money troubles? I wanna know!”)
Of course, many writers choose a subtler way to start their books and introduce the topic. But all good introductions share a few things. They trumpet their topic. They hone in on their point. They present their main actors.
Which brings us to the next principle.
Keep your spotlight on your protagonists
It’s always easier for a reader to follow a narrative if he can keep his eyes on a protagonist who is moving the plot forward, rather than on a succession of passively affected entities or zombified actions.
— Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
Good, engaging writing is a stage — a stage with actors who do things. The writer decides how the stage is designed, but it’s crucial that they keep their spotlight somewhat steady. If they decide to move the spotlight from one actor to another, they should do so slowly and intentionally.
Keeping the spotlight focused is an enormous challenge for me. Part of the reason is that I skip around ideas like a kid in a candy store. Why focus on one item when there’s so much to explore? The other reason is that keeping a steady spotlight contradicts many other writing rules I learned in school. For example, my grade school teacher taught me to vary words as much as possible. Never use the same word two sentences in a row, I was told.
Sounds familiar? There’s even a fear of using the same words twice: monologophobia. And to be fair, this can be engaging for the reader. When done wrong, however, it turns a steady spotlight into a hyperactive light show.
Consider this series of sentences:
My grade school teacher taught me how to write. The woman had brown hair. Teaching was a joy for the child-friendly person.
As standalone sentences, they might work great. But strung together, they create no arc of coherence whatsoever because their protagonist unexpectedly switches costumes in each sentence. (And what’s the hair suddenly doing in this narrative?)
To create a continuous narrative, protagonists must claim space on the stage. Let’s try that (coherent words in italics):
My grade school teacher, Ms English, taught me how to write. She enjoyed teaching because she loved children, and children loved her. She became notorious among her students for her luscious brown hair.
Not perfect. But at least we now have a steady spotlight on a protagonist who the reader can follow.
What did you expect?
Finally, here’s a principle that goes beyond creating coherent prose, and I like to remember it in all of my writing. I call it the principle of guiding expectations.
The principle is based on the idea that we get used to a certain idiosyncrasy of language and world views — that is, expectations. Writers need to keep these expectations in mind because if they don’t, they’ll pepper their texts with grains of confusion.
Compare these two phrases:
- A whale is not a fish but a mammal.
- A mouse is not a fish but a mammal.
Both phrases are true, but the second one radically subverts expectations. No one ever thought that a mouse had gills or fins. Why would anyone try to restate common sense? A whale, on the other hand, looks like a big fish and seems to breathe underwater. That’s why whales could be mistaken for fish. But no. Actually, whales breathe air, produce milk, and do lots of other mammalian stuff. Thus, we and whales share the same class.
This example might’ve seemed trivial. But bedazzled by the curse of knowledge, we often bust out wild assumptions without giving readers the chance to retrace our reasoning. To keep the conversation flowing, we must illuminate the rocky path ahead of them and carefully guide them into unfamiliar terrain.
Let’s assume — just for the sake of the argument — that scientists have discovered a new species of mice that does, in fact, qualify as fish. That’s a wild thesis! So, how could they guide the readers’ expectations without sounding like dunces?
In The Sense of Style, Pinker suggests unveiling the information in multiple stages. The more unfamiliar the proposition, the more stages might be required.
- You might think that mice are mammals.
- It’s justified to believe this because…
- However, new evidence suggests something strange: mice could also qualify as fish.
The principle of guiding expectations also applies to everything else we’ve looked at. Sentences turn into garden paths when a word sequence diverges from the reader’s expectations. Paragraphs read like word scraps when their building blocks don’t match a blueprint that’s familiar to the reader. Articles lose momentum when the title stokes expectations that aren’t met in the introduction.
Playing with expectations is fun, sure. I recall feeling glued to the page while reading books that constantly subverted my expectations, books like To Paradise. But I also try to remember that subverting expectations works best with ideas. Trying to subvert expectations within sentences, words, and paragraphs rarely strawberry.
On Sharpening Your Sense of Style
Lastly, I’d like to tell you a secret: I felt utterly overwhelmed when I first read The Sense of Style. Even now, after I meticulously combed through The Sense of Style, only saving the biggest nuggets, I still overthink everything. I’m scared to mess with the beauty of language.
The other day, I found some relief when I remembered a passage from A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. The passage tells an anecdote about a gifted artist who learns how to draw at art school:
Dennys went to art school to learn how to draw. For the first week, he said, they were allowed to draw whatever they wanted, and it was always Dennys’s sketches that the professor selected to pin up on the wall for praise and critique.
But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness.
Like Dennys, I often feel too self-conscious to write. Now, when I see a sentence, I see syntax trees, garden paths, and webs of coherence. There’s a fine line between developing a sense of style and a tyranny of style.
What is there to do?
The only way forward, I think, is to unlearn how to write. And then relearn how to write. Unlearn. Relearn. Again and again. Unlearning the rules of writing makes your style sloppy. Relearning them makes your style surgical. To become a good writer is to ride the pendulum that swings between these states and — eventually — rests in the middle.
Until I get there, I like to recall Pinker’s reasons to strive for good style: “to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world.”