The Problem with Writing-Style Advice

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.

As an exercise, I spent hours and hours and hours re-writing a chapter of my PhD thesis strictly according to Sword's principles. The eventual result was shorter, clearer and more readable. But it was hard work, and I'm not sure the effort justifies the reward for academic writers. For example, this post would score poorly if marked according to Sword's principles. Better to aim just for clear, short sentences.

Writing-advice is tricky.

The people who need it most are on the far side of a chasm they can't bridge without learning to read their own writing.

Doing so takes a mix of interest/dedication and practice that I suspect are hard to hack. The closest you can get, I think, is to spend some time breaking down, analyzing, critiquing, and "fixing" things others have written. You may also fare better, in calendar time, if you like writing and reading as ends.

If someone has learned to read themselves, you can give them all sorts of great advice. If they haven't, the best you can do is give straightforward "rules" they'll have some hope of spotting and fixing in their own work.

Edits:

- Yes--I think this holds for programming.

- Taking a newswriting class is my stock recommendation for ~working people who ask me "how write?"

I find it hard to reconcile what the author says in this article and what they say in an earlier article entitled "How to actually write a sentence", which is an explanation of how cohesion and coherence contribute to well-formed sentences, a topic Pinker spends a couple of chapters on in Sense of Style.

https://metaphorhacker.net/2020/02/how-to-actually-write-a-s...

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.

> Nobody (except many frustrated readers) is officially complaining that non-fiction writing is needlessly flowery and sprawling across many more pages than necessary.

Actually people do (I do too). I find that many of these books take one point that can be expressed succinctly in a short blog post and labour on it for an entire book. So to read it for entertainment is ok, but to read them for information is .. an utter waste of time. I've even picked up some of these reputed books from a book shelf, just read the cover notes .. and realise later on that the author really didn't have much else to say. I'm sorting of ranting here, but .. this needs to stop and I agree with the OP on this matter. My complaint is not against the authors themselves though. Its against the sheer waste of resources and mind time that such books consume.

> 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.

I was once assigned the difficult task of having discussions with students about potential cases of plagiarism. There were some interesting cases, but one stood out because it was too well written. The student had quite a remarkable answer when they were asked about it: they looked at how their source material was written and emulated the style.

This is a very important point for a couple of reasons:

1. The expectations of the audience in a given discipline can only be understood by examining other writing in that discipline.

2. There are some good academic writers out there.

> The problem with the likes of Steven Pinker and Helen Sword is that they like their own writing way too much. But I don’t. Like their writing, that is. [1] 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. I am not reading them for enjoyment, that’s what fiction is for.

I can’t help but read this in the voice of Dr. Kelso from Scrubs.

If you are writing academically, please watch this (or other) session by Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing Program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM , this is what he's been teaching for a long time, very eye-opening.

I took a technical writing course in engineering school and much later a legal writing course in law school.

After LS when I started writing stuff that mattered, I studied Bryan Garner's Lawprose work. At one law firm they invited him in to give a class. I really learned a lot from his books.

One thing I hold on to closely is to respect the time of your reader. (Especially busy people like judges.)

I feel like the author homogenizes all of academic writing. The needs of the English department are different than the needs of the computer science department. While there are a few universal virtues that all writing should strive for to be good, I think the domain of discourse is an indispensable factor in determining your style.

So instead of emulating the style of more successful people, I should instead take style guidance from this guy with a blog because he says that's how things should be? While his opinion may be interesting, I believe we can safely say that the market has spoken.

I am not making an appeal to authority here, my point is that the writers he is criticizing are far more successful than he is - and it is not a stretch to connect some of that success to their engaging style of writing.

"Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." -Seymour Skinner

Ironically, I like this author's style. It has a nice rhythm.

I completely disagree with the author's point. I cannot absorb dry writing, I need to be engrossed in reading to take in the content of a book. The context that the author choose to write the book in allows you to understand the way they think about the topic. Understanding they way an expert thinks about the topic allows you to understand that topic.

Writing facts is not writing, it is listing facts.

I strongly disagree with the author here. Good writing is not ornamental, it can be concise.

On the other hand, bad writing is often too long, convoluted and opaque.

The purpose of good style is to optimize the qualities of a text, not to flatter the author or the reader.

Check the style difference between "The God of Small Things" vs "No Great Mischief" both best sellers, very different styles.