What does it mean to write stylish and provocative prose?

I remember Professor Epstein saying something along the lines of  “this class focuses on writing as much as it does on the music of Paris in the 1920’s” (pardon my loose paraphrasing). I thought about this, and realized I wasn’t sure I had a clear idea of what constituted good writing. Because I enjoy reading, I’ve always had a vague sense of whether or not something was written well. However, I still felt that I was missing more explicit principles to guide this intuition. The best I could come up with was “remember to use the active voice” and “avoid run-on sentences”. After doing a little research, I came across a book written by linguist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century [1]. Before discussing the readings by Dorf and Moore, I thought it would be useful to explain some of Pinker’s ideas. Though I didn’t have access to the book, he highlights key themes in this lecture on YouTube, which I describe below:

As an aside, if you want to jump to the part where I talk about Dorf and Moore, please read several paragraphs ahead. Anyways, Pinker summarizes his main objective for writing with the following quote from William Strunk:

“Engage your readers attention through examples, illustrations, and anecdotes. Use clear concise language to express complex ideas. Avoid obfuscating Jargon. Favor active verbs and concrete nouns. Write with conviction, passion and verve”.

I thought this was a great list of principals to consider as we finish our last two blog posts and third paper. Unfortunately, Pinker explains that most academics fail to follow these simple maxims. While it is tempting to think that scholars want to maintain a façade of sophistication by confusing their readers, Pinker offers several other explanations.

The first is linguistic and psychological. Pinker explains that our “primate brain” evolved to understand physical experiences not abstractions. Most of the language we use (abstractions like nouns or idioms), is actually based in these direct experiences. For example, it is hard to understand the meaning of the word tension without visualizing two people tugging on a rope. Other idiomatic expressions like “hot potato” and “zip your lip” also package up these physical experiences into neat linguistic units of meaning. This process of abstraction is called chunking. The problem arises when writers, often scholars, create stacks of unfamiliar chunks, amounting to incomprehensible jargon.

Another reason Pinker believes academic writing often lacks clarity is due to our “postmodern self-consciousness”. This approach recognizes that objective truth is hard to grasp and that our theories and constructs about the world are imperfect. Unfortunately, this does not make for assertive and confident writing. Not only do scholars tend to apologize and signpost excessively, but they often include unnecessary hedging remarks. Pinker lists common disclaimers we should avoid: “somewhat, fairly, nearly, almost, in part, partially, relatively, comparatively, predominately, to some extent, [and] to a certain degree” (23:00).

As an antidote to these pitfalls, he suggests a “classic style” described by Turner and Thomas in Clear and Simple as the Truth. In contrast to post-modern self-consciousness, this approach assumes that the reader and writer share a common objective reality, which the writer elucidates with his or her thesis. In other words, “the writer orients the reader to something in the world which the reader can see with [their] own eyes. The goal is to help the reader see reality; the style is conversation” (14:50). Instead of cluttering your writing with disclaimers, we assume the reader is competent enough to evaluate our claims with a critical eye. We allow them to read between the lines.

Now I’m going to break all the rules I just described by apologizing and hedging for that rather long digression. Obviously, the ideas Pinker presents are not really a bible for writing, and we should feel free to exercise our post-modern skepticism. I’m also acutely aware that none of this was directly relevant to our readings. Despite this, I hope this information is useful and that my summary spares you from taking notes on a long lecture.

Back to Dorf and Moore. Upon re-examining the texts with these new tools, I anticipated finding several glaring examples of these errors. With Dorf, this was generally not the case. I thought his prose was stylish, and largely maintained a confident and assertive tone***. Consider excerpts like this:

“Restraint and decorum were paramount to Polignac’s survival in Paris. And distance from some of the more flamboyant lesbian personalities was important for social reasons. It was not only necessary to carefully guard her actions in public, but also to shield her private life from the close scrutiny of her enemies. Even when she used the utmost discretion in her love affairs, the gossip columnists and even her friends still found ways to make her the target of their writings” (93).

Instead of creating long compound sentences, Dorf splits the first two sentences into separate ideas. Not only does this aid comprehension, but it also draws the reader into the paragraph. Then Dorf follows up with two longer more explanatory sentences, which serves to satisfy our desire for further explanation. The paragraph excerpt also centers around a unified theme, namely that Polignac had to hide her sexuality to avoid social consequences. While this theme isn’t explicitly stated, with previous context, the reader knows Dorf is discussing Polignac’s sexuality. This actually coincides with the idea of “classic style” as the writer allows the reader to fill in the gaps without excessive signposting.

As for Moore, he is also a similarly stylish writer. There are certainly many well written paragraphs, but there are a just few places where I thought his point could have been clearer. Here’s an example from his discussion of Aubade:

“Arguably the emotional core of the ballet, the Andante exemplifies with particular acuity the camp strategies pervading Poulenc’s ballet, especially in the way in which the music articulates an unresolvable dualism between the competing registers of authenticity and theatricality” (326).

Personally, it took me a couple readings to fully grasp the meaning of this sentence. The final clause about dualism cluttered the sentence along with nested prepositional phrases like “with particular acuity” and “in the way in which”. Armed with Pinker’s criticisms of academic writing, I was even tempted to nitpick Moore’s use of the disclaimer “arguably”. But, I decided it’s a useful transition and doesn’t detract from the overall point. Finally, as an example of chunking, I had to return to a point much earlier in the text to grasp the meaning of “an unresolvable dualism between the competing the registers of authenticity and theatricality”. The chunks of authenticity and theatricality require the reader to remember their earlier comparison to lies and truth:

“Jean Cocteau, writing long before “camp” emerged as a cultural buzzword, succinctly described these particular moments as “lies that tell the truth.” Poulenc … discovered his own voice by exploiting the tensions between lies and truths, and between the related aesthetic registers of theatricality and authenticity” (303-304).

In other words, this conflict between Poulenc’s theatricality and authenticity reflects his conflict over expressing his sexuality. This unresolvable tension seems to be the crux of camp. However, this point was not clear without significant investigation by the reader.

The reason I’m more hesitant in this criticism is that I still have reservations about what constitutes good style and prose. Maybe all of my qualms are really things that a conscientious reader should do. Ultimately, it seems the negotiation between reader and writer is dependent on context: the responsibilities of the writer to eliminate confusing jargon depends on the assumed prior knowledge of the audience.

 

 

***This not a compliment of the overall architecture of Dorf’s argument. Ultimately, I thought his thesis was a little unclear and inconsistent throughout. While Dorf made ample use of primary sources, they didn’t always have the effect of advancing his thesis and were sometimes tangential. Of course, now I’ve realized that my entire discussion of style is basically a big tangent and digression from the original prompt which was more related to argumentation. 🙁