The Problem with Writing-Style Advice

The author might not like Pinker's writing, but this hardly speaks against Pinker's advice. I have a feeling he read the first chapter of The Sense of Style and decided the whole thing is bullshit because it's about style and not substance.

But the author clearly accepts the need for some level of style. The blog theme they use has a readable column-width, a table of contents, etc. And the advice they give fits with Pinker's. For example, "Rich outlines" is relevant to chapter 5 of Pinker, "Arcs of Coherence."

> I want to get some information from them and I want to get examples and counterexamples for the points they make. I want them to get to the point.

Pinker's book is fairly dense on the advice front, and chock full of examples. Including ones about academic writing that involve shorter sentences and more clarity, like rewording "Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word" into "We presented participants with a sentence, followed by the word 'true' or 'false'."

> The first advice you need to give to an academic writer is not to read a book on stylish writing but rather to read how people in their field are writing. Because those are their potential readers....

Sure, but they don't have to be the only readers, and jargon and bad style make a community insular. And beside, even for those readers, the point (particularly beyond chapter 1) is that conveying meaning efficiently requires sound structure.

One gets the feeling that the author likes jargon and density for its own sake, or because it makes the author feel like a member of the community. They seem to assume that better-styled writing will necessarily be less scrupulous:

> clear explicit structure and moderately shorter sentences. No stories, no metaphors, no flourishes. No avoidance of passives or reduction of adverbs. No worries about technical language. Just these two. They will not only make the academic writing easier to read, they will also make it more scrupulous.

Okay, maybe stories aren't appropriate in academic papers, nor inexact metaphors, but so what? That's not a matter of style.

And why just these two? Would the author's thesis be better stated as "worry about structure and concision first"? Because I don't think Pinker's book would disagree with that.

I don't accept the premise that you must choose between stylish and informative writing, but the argument fails at the outset. Complaining that Pinker (one assumes especially in his A Sense of Style, which I recommend without reservation) writes poorly for academics by focusing on his writing for a non-academic audience. If you desire a more "academic" style, Pinker is quite capable of providing it, if you look at his journal articles (the abstract to his Formal Models of Abstract Learning at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002... should provide sufficient evidence of his familiarity with the norms). One important aspect of a writer's style is how it is directed toward the audience, and Pinker is frequently (and Gladwell is always) not writing for an academic audience. This post also has a fundamental begging-the-question problem: the academic writing it describes is not notable for an absence of style, but for a very specific terse style that is difficult to do well.

Ironically, it's hard for me to take this manifesto seriously because of the author's poor grammar. I found the awkward and/or incorrect structure of many sentences distracting and ultimately gave up after the second or third section. This doesn't invalidate the author's ideas, but it does suggest that writing style matters to at least some degree.

I think I agree. I also think it’s weird to laud academic writing as it is often quite bad, having a tendency to go on and on with some pointless complexity (do you feel like a real academic when you write “not unreasonable”? I claim that ordinarily the only nuance between this and “reasonable” is that writing one makes you feel clever).

Historically academic writing has been constrained by page limits (compare papers written by Euler to Gauss). But as publishing has moved online and expensive this has become less of an issue. And if you wrote a book there were far fewer constraints on length.

Writing correctly comes before writing well and both of these are prerequisites for anything that would be called a style. Badly written is not really a style IMHO.