That clear writing leads to clear thinking is not restricted to the academic world

Steven Pinker, a professor in the psychology department of Harvard University, is known as the author of How the Brain Works, but much of his work is, in reality, devoted to language and expression, what he calls elsewhere “the stuff of thought”.

The style of this book might suggest it was yet another mandarin book, filled with nit-picking about points of grammar in a very abusive way by a classically educated person (characterised by H. L. Mencken as “the American school marm”) often unable to write well themselves. But note his subtitle: this is a book about English language usage “in the 21st Century”, not the reign of Queen Victoria.

Pinker is very far removed from the sort of academic outlook epitomised by the official dictionary of the French language of the French Academy which only recognised some 150,000 words when the language of the French bubbled with neologisms.

He starts out, as might be expected, with trying to explain the biological basis of expression and the development of thought as a result. These first chapters are relatively short, for the real meat of the book is the fifth and final chapter, “Telling Right from Wrong” – in many circumstances, a matter of some great moral weight, of course.

A saying attributed to E.M. Forster, “How do I know what I think till I write it down?”, was nuanced by the poet Auden into “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”

Discovery

Writing, then, is not a process of revelation but of discovery. But what one finds one thinks still needs to be expressed clearly, and there is the rub. Pinker is very good on disposing of myths about the effects of social change on writing. Things are not really decaying as so many think, they are merely changing. But as we all know change for many people is a very disturbing experience.

Pinker’s idea of style is evinced in his own writings which perform the very difficult task of expressing scientific ideas in a way which the ordinary reader can understand.

Excellent as it is, Steven Pinker’s book is not going to replace what I think is the best book of its kind, The Reader Over Your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, first published in 1943. That book is almost a master class in prose, for the authors analyse not just phrases, but long passages, from articles and books by eminent writers, demonstrating their various failings in clarity and expression. Their victims were also allowed to answer back, which some did very strongly. It is a book with many lessons still to impart, but alas is now available only in an academic edition with the same authors’ excellent social history of the interwar years, The Long Weekend (Carcanet Press, £40.50).