"Plain talk" writing: The new literary obfuscation

“Plain-talk” writing has replaced pretentious writing as the main stylistic mannerism impeding thought. More than a half century ago, George Orwell identified vague abstraction and stale imagery as contributors to political bedevilment: they are the means for making the vile acceptable by concealing its substance. The object of Orwell’s scorn hasn’t disappeared. Politicians and their sycophants still substitute high-flown cliché for penetrating depiction, but that form of literary dishonesty is, today, overshadowed by the abuse of cognitive fluency—by the cult of simplicity. This mode’s mainstay is the non-sequitur; its object of concealment, logical irrelevance; its mechanism, the short, plain sentence. When the new obfuscation becomes pedagogy, writing teachers present its virtue as that of writing as you talk; they call the style “conversational.” It demonstrates that concreteness and vagueness are entirely compatible.

Everyone knows you can’t write efficaciously the same as you talk. So, common sense revises the plain-talk project—using the simple and illogical expressional methods the advocates purvey. A writing blog, CopyBlogger, advises—to the applause of commenters—“Write like you talk, except better. Better words, better arrangement, better flow.” As if this advice were informative.

As a rule, no examples are given, and some of this style’s most ardent practitioners may deny their practice of “writing as you talk.” Writing teacher Wayne Schiess responded to Dr. George D. Gopen’s disparagement of this advice by calling his argument a straw man. Wayne had never heard this advice.

Blogger Luke Muehlhauser provides the rare express example of writing as you talk, and his example ably, if unwittingly, demonstrates how this approach to writing undermines lucid thought: (1), below, is Muehlhauser’s rendition of how a writer would ordinarily state a thought; (2) is Muehlhauser’s recommended rewriting, designed to combine the clarity of writing with the readability of talk:

(1) Perhaps the toughest intellectual work we must do regarding European reconstruction is to realize that it can be achieved through nonpolitical instrumentalities. Reconstruction will not be politics, but engineering.

(2) We have a tough job ahead of us. We need to figure out how to reconstruct Europe. It won’t happen with political forces. The European reconstruction will be a matter of engineering, not politics.

The plain-talk version, (2), is more cognitively fluent than is (1): it deftly hides the contradictions and vagueness baldly evident in (1). First, reference to “instrumentalities” in (1) impels readers to seek to identify them and calls readers’ attention to the merely negative characterization of the “instrumentalities” as “nonpolitical.” Second, the reader of (1) naturally demands to know how “we” are supposed to act through “nonpolitical instrumentalities,” when “politics,” after all, denotes our means for consciously coordinating the actions of numerous persons. Third, if realizing that Europe can’t be reconstituted through politics requires tough intellectual work (it actually was reconstructed through the very political Marshall Plan) the writer isn’t entitled to announce the conclusion in advance of the required work. These objections, occurring naturally to the reader of (1), make that version clear but hard to read. The reader tries to make sense of it, in the face of signals that (1) is false, and readers find known falsehood harder to understand than probable truth.

The “plain-talk” version, (2), expresses the same information contained in (1). The difference is that the clauses in (2) are poorly connected. Although (2) urges readers to figure out how “we” can reconstruct Europe, the inconceivability of collective action being nonpolitical is pushed from the foreground by replacing nonpolitical instrumentalities, through which we act, with nonpolitical forces, which happen. Furthermore, the unexpressed connection between, on the one hand, the conclusion about Europe’s nonpolitical reconstruction and, on the other, the intellectual work from which the conclusion follows, hides absurdity, that of announcing in advance a conclusion of work undone.

The integration fostered by (1)’s concision fosters skepticism of its flawed reasoning. The disjointed “conversational” style of (2) makes the flawed reasoning easier to overlook. Whether Muehlhauser prefers this outcome is unclear.

Some writing skills can undermine thought. THE UNITY OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT. Part 3.

Earlier entries in The Unity of Language and Thought series:

Part 1. Can bad writers be good thinkers?

Part 2. Are good writers good thinkers?

The skills improving persuasiveness contribute unequally to thought; some may even detract: while good writing renders ideas more precise and manipulable, that’s not all it does. Distinguishing the thought-promoting aspects of persuasion prevents beguilement by rhetorical flair.

Ornamentation and convention contribute little if any to thoughtful quality. Ornamentation (which will consume most of our attention) increases a document’s emotional appeal. Euphony, dependent on surface qualities of expression—those which rarely survive translation—falls in this category. Alliteration, assonance, and consonance bear little relation to the quality of thought.

Also playing on affect are the rhetorical figures (excluding simile and metaphor, because they can make an important contribution to Clarity, a Writing Virtue). Law Professor Ward Farnsworth’s new book Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric abundantly illustrates the rhetorical figures, which invoke three types of pattern: repetition of words and phrases; structure, such as parallelism; and dramatic devices, such as rhetorical questions. Repetition serves adornment most single-mindedly; contrast with parallel structure, obligatory when the elements are logically parallel, as in lists and correlated conjuncts.

The distinction between clarifying and purely rhetorical devices is the difference between a simplicity due to efficient compression of information—as accomplished by any good theory—and simplicity for presentation’s sake. An example of the latter is Republican Presidential–candidate Herman Cain’s 9–9–9 tax plan, a proposal chosen for its sheer simplicity, unbolstered by reasons for taxing the three components identically. The difference is between scientific elegance and marketing catchiness.

This is not to say that the rhetorical figures are unimportant in legal writing. To the contrary, instruction is remiss in its neglect of rhetoric, since legal-brief writing, above all, is persuasive. The point is rather that the rhetorical-figures’ persuasiveness is irrational when it rests on the general qualitative correspondence between writing and thought. But factors besides the quality of thought help persuade judges; and judges, all too human, aren’t entirely rational.

This analysis of rhetoric’s somewhat unreasonable role provides another explanation for legalese, based on its function. Insofar as rhetoric is a means to persuasiveness neither reflecting the writer’s quality of thought nor enhancing the reader’s rationality of judgment, a legal system priding itself on procedural egalitarianism may seek to banish it. While identifying rhetoric by black-letter rule might be impossible, the “system” could approximate its goal by fostering a rhetorically unartful legal-writing style. At the same time, this style incorporates, as “substitute gratification,” formulaic rhetoric, such as trite doublets and triplets. (Notice the analogy between how the law staunches pomposity by supplying pompous forms that don’t make the lawyer look pompous and how it suppresses rhetoric by supplying rhetorical forms with an antirhetorical effect.)

Following arbitrary conventions is another major way (after ornamentation) to improve as writer without necessarily improving as thinker. An excellent speller can be an incompetent thinker. The same goes for other arbitrary conventions, such as capitalization and font choice.

Font choice brings us to the second reason for distinguishing those literary aspects enhancing thought from those favoring persuasiveness by other means. Over-valuing one’s own ideas is a pitfall when seeking objectivity and rationality. We’ve seen how writers—by sheer exposure—fall in love with their own style, but exposure also endears their self-produced content to writers’ hearts. Writers striving to think clearly and deeply can benefit from less persuasiveness in their private writing. This is perhaps part of the benefit of handwritten drafts and other formal variations decreasing documents' cognitive fluency, thereby increasing writers' self-criticalness—improving their logical rigor, representational accuracy, and intellectual honesty. Reviewing one’s writing cast in a more disfluent typography, such as 8-point fonts, produces the same effect. Varying the medium—screen or paper—also can contribute to a more critical attitude toward one’s work. These variations benefit private thought for the same reason they sabotage public persuasion.

Are good thinkers good writers? Part 2 of THE UNITY OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

The Unity of Language and Thought Series. Part 2

The last entry upheld the indispensability of writing for thought. We now turn now to the indispensability of high-quality writing for deep thought. 

Taking stock empirically is the most direct approach, but perhaps recognized deep thinkers are good writers because writing promotes their recognition, instead of enhancing their cognition. My strategy is to focus on pairs of deep thinkers whose discoveries or inventions were simultaneous, briefly reviewing some relevant commentary and providing short samples of their styles. Promotional considerations are weaker on knowledge's cusp, this particularly true for the less credited thinker, who, after all, failed in his promotional endeavors. Selection by a predetermined criterion also prevents cherry picking samples.

We’ll look at the scientists responsible for two simultaneous discoveries or inventions: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (theory of organic evolution) and Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz (the calculus).

Darwin is regarded by scholars as a literary as well as scientific genius.

Darwin really was one of the great natural English prose stylists… This is Darwin's method: an apparently modest allegiance to mere fact gathering abruptly crystallizes into a whole world view. Compares his methods to those of Trollope and George Eliot… (http://tinyurl.com/4s8h2yw.)

Here’s a sample:

It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long-past geological ages, that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were. (Darwin (1872) The Origin of Species.)

Note, for now, one remarkable feature: the 53-word average sentence length.

The co-discoverer of organic evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, unlike Charles Darwin, isn’t a household name. Scholars regard Wallace as an extraordinary writer; what he lacked was Darwin’s intellectual courage.

… [Wallace’s] consummate writing style. Joseph Conrad kept Wallace’s classic "The Malay Archipelago" on his night table, drawing on it in several of his own books, most notably "Lord Jim." (http://tinyurl.com/5rwnm5a)

Yet you wonder whether Wallace’s intellectual timidity affected his writing style. A sample:

A belief so general, one would think, must rest on indisputable facts, and be a logical deduction from them. Yet I have come to the conclusion that not only is it very doubtful, but absolutely erroneous; that it not only deviates widely from the truth, but is in almost every particular exactly opposed to it. I believe, in short, that birds do not build their nests by instinct; that man does not construct his dwelling by reason; that birds do change and improve when affected by the same causes that make men do so; and that mankind neither alter nor improve when they exist under conditions similar to those which are almost universal among birds. (Alfred Russel Wallace (1870) Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection.)

Wallace sounds bolder than Darwin, but his writing isn’t quite as good because he uses writing flaws—excessive use of intensifiers, such as “very doubtful,” “absolutely erroneous,” and “exactly opposed"—to amplify the projected impression of boldness, a boldness that protests too much. For our purpose, the relevant observations are that Wallace is more than a competent writer, but his intellectual shortcomings produce writing flaws.

 
Newton’s writing isn’t celebrated, but his frequently quoted bon mots prove his literary capacity, as below:

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. (Isaac Newton (1726). Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.)

"I do not feign hypotheses” lives on.

 
Leibnitz was an accomplished writer, whose concision is particularly remarkable—he wrote philosophy treatises in the space of pamphlets. Leibnitz’s work methods demonstrate the attention he paid to perfecting the written expression of his ideas as an integral part of their formation.

Leibniz thought on paper, and he even designed a special carriage which rode more smoothly over ruts and bumps, so that he could write while traveling… The way he wrote was as follows: He used folio paper, which was a little shorter and wider than the modern A3, folded in two to make four sides of foolscap, which is a bit narrower and longer than the modern A4. He wrote in the left-hand half of each side, leaving the right-hand half for corrections and additions, of which there were many. He then gave his almost illegible draft to his copyist, to write out a fair copy - usually beautifully written, with plenty of space between the lines. Leibniz would then correct the copy, and either have it sent off; or, if there were too many corrections, get the copyist to write it out again. (http://tinyurl.com/5rwnm5a.)

Leibnitz and Newton fought over priority for the calculus, but that wasn’t their only disagreement: Leibnitz took a different view of Newton's “feigning hypotheses.”

…we find some quality in a subject, we ought to believe that if we understood the nature of both the subject and the quality we would conceive how the quality could arise from it. So within the order of nature (miracles apart) it is not at God's arbitrary discretion to attach this or that quality haphazardly to substances. He will never give them any which are not natural to them, that is, which cannot arise from their nature as explicable modifications. So we may take it that matter will not naturally possess the attractive power referred to above, and that it will not of itself move in a curved path, because it is impossible to conceive how this could happen—that is, to explain it mechanically—whereas what is natural must be such as could become distinctly conceivable by anyone admitted into the secrets of things. (Gottfried Leibnitz (1996) New Essays on Human Understanding, Cambridge University Press.)

In modern terms, Newton and Leibnitz were debating physical action at a distance, posited by Newton’s theory of gravity. History’s verdict regarding this dispute—expressed in Einstein’s general relativity— is that Leibnitz’s positions were true, but Newton’s genius consisted in apprehending the most scientifically useful framework, ignoring even its logical incoherence. Perhaps these tendencies are evident in their writing styles: Newton’s attic and direct. Leibnitz’s writing does an excellent job expressing a dry philosophical question compellingly, bearing in mind he was espousing principles that were only vaguely understood. 

Objectivity demands attention to adverse evidence, and Socrates, who left no written works, stands out. Whether some sophisticated oral methods can play writing’s role in thought deserves exploration, but the reason for Socrates’s barrenness ambiguates its significance. As a matter of principle, Socrates opposed permanent records of ideas, denouncing them as vehicles for dogmatism. Consequently, we don’t know he was a bad writer: he eschewed writing as a means of communication rather than of thought.

Next entry will analyze the writing processes important for thought.

Can bad writers be good thinkers? Part 1 of THE UNITY OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

The Unity of Language and Thought Series. Part 1.

According to a common view, “good enough” writing—a modicum of quality—suffices. If persuasiveness of argument and lucidity of expression are independent factors, a superior product is resource-wasting overkill. Contesting the common view is the doctrine asserting language and thought’s unity. I owe Bryan Garner the idea of applying the doctrine to legal writing:

In law, the quality of writing matters. Good writing can win cases, and bad writing can lose them. To some, this notion is self-evident. But to others it's dubious at best.

What explains these markedly divergent views? Ultimately, the disagreement hinges on the extent to which a given lawyer understands that language molds every human thought. Language is embedded in the very way in which you perceive the world. Thus, it's impossible for a judge to focus exclusively on the merits of a case without being affected by the language used to express those merits. (B. Garner, The Winning Brief.)

The concept of the unity of language and thought itself I owe to the great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky:

Speech [read writing] does not merely serve as the expression of developed thought. Thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech. It is not expressed but completed in the word. (L. Vygotsky (1986) Thought and Language.)

Succinctly, “Thought is not expressed by language but takes place in it.” (Ibid.)

Vygotsky’s psychology emphasizes that we think by means of “inner speech”; hence, the terms conveying an argument co-determine its construal and effectiveness. The linguistic character of thought is the essential reason the quality of expression matters.

Anyone who denies that thought and language co-determine a brief’s persuasiveness should find an occupation not involving writing briefs, but the implications of the unity of thought and language go further than this truism about persuasiveness. The unity applies, I claim, not only to writing’s reception but also to its production. The unity of language and thought implies:

1) Good writing requires deep thought;

2) Deep thought requires good writing.

To personalize, good writers are good thinkers and good thinkers are good writers.

Point 1 is less contentious than point 2: vacuous thoughts don’t challenge a writer’s skill; Point 1 is also less interesting: a low order of intellectual depth provides ample space to demonstrate incompetence (hence, competence by comparison). In principle, intellectual shallowness limits expressive power, but in practice it does so weakly.

Point 2, on the other hand, makes a strong, contentious claim. It precludes that popular construct the "homespun philosopher" and rejects the populist tenet that many great thinkers go unrecognized because they're inarticulate.But to avoid unwarranted contention, we must be precise about the meanings of both "thought" and "good": Point 2 doesn't claim that the human intellect rests entirely on literary skill. Only deep thought—coherent multistep reasoning with abstract concepts—requires written expression to flourish. To take a familiar example, a trial attorney who is an incompetent writer but is quick on his feet, alert to testimonial incongruities, and shrewd in negotiation need function only in oral mode. To claim the attorney is a poor thinker is at best ambiguous: such attorneys are, in any event, reasonably intelligent. The claim isn’t that bad writers are stupid.

Nor is "good thinking" good in the sense of being correct. Deep thinking constructs theories that are capable of being true about complex matters involving abstractions. A usage point helps clarify. When shallow thinking is applied to complex abstract matters, we call the result stupid. When deep thinking about the same matters goes very wrong, we instead call it crazy, and crazy thought retains at least the possibility of accuracy: you can’t reasonably reject it without comprehension, whereas shallowness disqualifies thought concerning abstract topics. Good writing doesn’t necessarily deserve consideration, but on such topics, bad writing deserves disregard. Properly understood, the claim—contentious enough as it is—asserts that deep thinkers must be capable writers because writing is part of the thinking process.

With this clarification, the claim still conflicts with the received view, but a certain universal writing experience refutes the received view by demonstrating that writing quality sets a limit on thought quality. The experience is that of arriving at profound insights during writing’s course. We can’t devise a complete plan predicting our conclusions; writing lives its own life and decides its own destiny. Unforeseeable insight proves that thought without written expression would be impoverished.

Intellectual discovery continues to surprise experienced writers —revealing how counter-intuitive is the dependence of thought on writing—despite their coming to accept its occurrence intellectually. But though suggestive, unforeseen discovery doesn’t quite prove the relationship between the quality of writing and the quality of thought. A gap remains between the proof that deep thought requires writing and the conclusion that it requires high-quality writing. In the next entry, I intend to close the gap.

Next entry: Good thinkers are good writers.