Comment by ajarmst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajarmst | Hacker News Reader

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.

I think I agree. I also think it’s weird to laud academic writing as it is often quite bad, having a tendency to go on and on with some pointless complexity (do you feel like a real academic when you write “not unreasonable”? I claim that ordinarily the only nuance between this and “reasonable” is that writing one makes you feel clever).

Historically academic writing has been constrained by page limits (compare papers written by Euler to Gauss). But as publishing has moved online and expensive this has become less of an issue. And if you wrote a book there were far fewer constraints on length.

I'm far from being an academic, but if I were to make a less snarky interpretation, "not unreasonable" would be written if the reasonableness isn't binary, meaning that "not unreasonable" doesn't necessarily mean "reasonable", and that interchanging the two might lead to a less accurate, stronger statement. Alternatively, one would write "not unreasonable" as a way of contrast relative to something that was previously claimed to be "unreasonable".

I can think lots of other reasons, but feeling clever isn't one of them. I mean, if someone would like to feel clever, there's probably a more eloquent synonym for that.

Deleted a comment about how "not unreasonable" isn't equivalent to "unreasonable", because I think OP was actually making a different point: like Orwell pointed out in Politics and the English Language (and, yes, this argument has been making the rounds since at least the 1940s)---the problem isn't that the phrase is the same as "reasonable", but that it's so hackneyed as to lose any value.

I don't think the article's argument is that Pinker is a bad writer or doesn't know how to write for an academic audience; it's that Pinker is missing the point when he tries to tell others how to make academic writing better.

I watched one of Pinker's lectures on writing, and thought it was mostly fluff, full of snarky "look how awful this scientific writing is, ha ha."

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