The first is a practical source of advice on how to write more clearly, not just for academics or professionals who want to branch out or be clearer on the job, but also for people who want to start a blog or series of reviews or anything like that. Is there anything else you’d like to say about The Sense of Style? A lot of legalese is just professional bad bits carried over from one generation of lawyers to another with no good reason. It could be removed from every single legal document, and replaced it with “Jones” or whatever, and it would not have any bearing on the legal interpretation but it would make the document a heck of a lot easier to read. For example, “the party of the first part” actually serves no purpose whatsoever. In fact, there’s a movement in the legal profession to reduce legalese to the minimum necessary, because a lot of legalese doesn’t serve that purpose of anticipating an uncooperative reader. Well, but legalese can also be made less impenetrable. And the exception that proves the rule is legalese, where you don’t have the presumption of cooperation that you have in ordinary conversation, so you have to include all these qualifications to preemptively anticipate an uncooperative reader.

The goal is to get the reader to see the truth, which the writing has made self-evident.Ī good writer takes advantage of the ordinary charity that we must indulge in during everyday conversation, the Gricean maxims of cooperation, the commonsense of the reader that means you wouldn’t interpret a generalization as a law. Rather, classic style prizes clarity as the ultimate virtue: It simulates a scenario where the writer has noticed something in the world that the reader has not yet noticed, and so the writer places the reader in a position to notice that thing and the reader can see it with their own eyes. It doesn’t have a specific goal like providing the reader with information, which is the goal of plain style.

Yeah, classic style-a concept that I took from Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner-is a style that they contrast with plain style. So you have advice on never using alliteration, never using an ornate word when a simple one will do, when really language can be clear and stylish without being abstemious and puritanical. But that being said, the emphasis in many style manuals on plain style has been taken to an extreme, especially in the early part of the 20th century, where the style guides were a reaction to the ornate style of the 19th century.

Steven pinker's the sense of style