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grouchymusicologist comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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34. Obey these rules before you obey grammarians, who say things like "Don't split infinitives" or "Don't begin sentences with And or But" and "Don't end a sentence with a preposition."
Real grammarians, i.e. linguists who study the grammar of English as it is, teach us that these aren't actually rules of grammar anyway, so much as prescriptions that were made up out of whole cloth for various reasons and that never had much to do with the way English was spoken or written. Here, for example, is an index of postings on Language Log (a group blog run by several professional linguists) about the split-infinitive issue. (The well-known story of this silly prescription was that it was decided in the 18th century that, since you can't split infinitives in Latin [Latin infinitives are a single word], you shouldn't split them in English either.)
Relatedly, the passive in English has a bad reputation that is not very well deserved. See here for a full explanation by the author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
You'd think this was just so much nitpicking -- and to some extent it is -- but understanding these issues fully can help you make better rhetorical use of English. This is particularly true of the passive -- the article I linked above explains how passive and active versions of the same clause help us place emphasis in a sentence exactly where it will do us the most good. (As such, I think the strongest version of your point 13 that I could endorse would be "Understand clearly the difference between active and passive, and choose between them advisedly.")
One more point which I raise not least because it's a stunningly entertaining read: the same author's (Geoff Pullum's) "The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style" (PDF), an utter demolition of the grammar advice given in Strunk and White's book. This is NOT to say that S&W's stylistic advice should be thrown out as well, but Pullum certainly establishes that (a) they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about when grammar is concerned, and that (b) they follow almost none of their own grammatical or stylistic prescriptions, so the whole thing should be taken with a grain of salt. Read Pullum's article if you enjoy a well-deserved poison pen book review and would like to learn a few things about English grammar in the process.
I hesitate to counter your nitpicking with more nitpicking, but I do agree that "understanding these issues fully can help you make better rhetorical use of English". And so, I'd like to correct some of what you write about the split infinitive. The story is somewhat more subtle and interesting.
The well-known story of this silly prescription was that it was decided in the 18th century that, since you can't split infinitives in Latin [Latin infinitives are a single word], you shouldn't split them in English either.
This well-known story is actually a myth that has no factual basis. It is not true that the prohibition against split infinitives was decided in the 18th century (they started debating it mid-19th century), and more importantly none of the grammarians railing against it in those times based their arguments on anything to do with Latin. Never happened. The story seems to be a modern 20th-century invention, and has spread widely among those who oppose prescriptive grammarians because it makes them look very silly. It is repeated in many popular articles and books (e.g. Pinker's The Language Instinct), but for all that is completely untrue.
The interesting question, then, is - why did prescriptive grammarians of the 19th century start railing against the split infinitive, whereas the grammarians of the 18th century didn't much care about it? And the answer is, in the 18th century the split infinitive largely wasn't there. There are some examples we can find going back all the way to the 14th century, but they are rare examples. In fact, if you just read some random 18th century prose, you're likely to quickly run into phrases that sound a little awkward to the modern ear, because they seem to intentionally avoid splitting the infinitive. But those authors didn't try to write awkwardly or intentionally avoid the split infinitive (which wasn't known as a prohibition). They were using the conventions of their time in which it was a rarity.
In the 19th century the split infinitive started occurring more often (perhaps became a fad of sorts), and that's why the grammarians noticed it. Ever since then, despite all their efforts, it has only grown more popular and accepted. And yet minding your split infinitives is not bad advice to a writer (although wholesale rejection is decidedly silly), because, when overused, they tend to sound gimmicky and tinny (to forestall the obvious objection "anything is bad when overused": true, but split infinitives get there faster. You can't easily go wrong with sentences filled with "to X Y-ly", but do just a few "to Y-ly X" in a sequence, and it begins to look weird).
(I also disagree with your praise of Pullum's persistent critique of S&W; there's much criticism that can be made of that book, but it deserves criticism made in good faith. This blog post (not by me) offers a few clear examples of what I found distasteful in Pullum's bombastic approach.)
Thanks for the interesting comment and my apologies for having passed along an evident falsehood.
But do also note that a lot of people do believe those prescriptions to be valid, and view breaking them to be low status. All the "singular they is fine" blog posts in the world are irrelevant if using singular they will annoy half your readers.
Of course, I tend to use singular they anyway. It's often the best alternative and I doubt that many people in my likely target audience will really care. But you should still know the biggest things that will annoy people, so that if you use them, it will be out of conscious choice and not of ignorance.
Could stand more emphasis, in my opinion; this seems to be the overarching goal which subsumes the other advice. If your intended audience doesn't like in media res, for instance, don't do it.
I once had a professor that insisted that the construction "X. However, Y" was grammatically incorrect and forbade anyone in her class from using it.
The mind, it boggles.
Agree with all this. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grance also has pretty decent coverage of what you say above.
Also, I've removed the comma after "grammarians," which compactly addresses some of your "nitpicks."
As much for any LW commenter as for you: I don't mean to pick on you, but it is physically difficult to read your writing and I really, authentically want to understand what you're saying. Because I'm positive it's valuable.
I'm confused. Was grouchymusicologist's comment significantly different prior to editing? I don't see any issues with the way it is now. (I also don't see anything that isn't covered in Intro to Linguistics, but the links are good resources and the material generally bears repeating for a wider audience.)
I'm confused. I wouldn't call the above comment an example of some of the clearer writing on this site, but I don't find that anything about it significantly impedes my comprehension.
Although come to think of it, I've heard more or less the same points before, so maybe my perception of its clarity is corrupted by prior knowledge.
Yes, it is. As well as by probably being smarter than I am, and likely possessing a longer attention span and more self-control in general. Without having to work at it.
Was it the construction of the paragraph that you're found confusing, or the assumed prior knowledge of various grammatical disputes (splitting infinitives, passive vs. active, singular they)?
Again, I don't mean to pick on grouchymusicologist. And clearly LW is a special place on the internet, in terms of productive discussion. But my eyes cross and I clench my fists a little when comments consist of "Yes, yes, but [long, extremely detailed nitpick in academic-ese]." So I guess I'm not positive it's valuable, despite what I said above.
Rationality and clear thinking should be as basic as Dick and Jane. But I'm willing to update my beliefs if someone shows me otherwise.
You're not helping to clarify what aspect of the comment made it seem like "Yes, yes, but [long, extremely detailed nitpick in academic-ese]" for people who didn't perceive it that way.
It's one of the most highly upvoted comments on the page (after another nitpick), and it seems to completely miss the point of the OP. Call me naive, but I was hoping commenters would deliberately try to follow Luke's recommendations.
I reacted emotionally because I'm frustrated by the mental distance between myself and the "people who didn't perceive it that way." I'm doubly frustrated by the mental distance between those people and the rest of the world. The world needs you guys! Don't make it so hard for them to understand what you're trying to say!
Provisionally agree in the general sense, but... should linguistics? (And what about physics?) I guess my objection is: if someone has an academic nitpick, why shouldn't it be phrased in the dialect of academia?
A lot of things (most things) on LW are about rationality and clear thinking, but some are about (and require) specialized knowledge. Conflating the two subjects by applying the same standards of discourse seems counterproductive.
To see what happens if it isn't phrased in the dialect of academia. Maybe nothing bad will happen. Maybe something really good will happen.
There is a cost to simplicity in terms of precision. There's a lot to be said about finding ways to convey your ideas with "beautiful simplicity" -- in the way often attributed to Feynman -- but some ideas just cannot be reduced to such a level, and some of those ideas are important.
Case in point: the differences between what a frequentist means by "probablity" and what a Bayesian means by "probability". The existential significance of the lack of curvature to the universe. (Sure, I could say, "Why its a big deal that spacetime is flat" -- but that's conveying a different range of meanings than the other statement, which if I hadn't already 'primed' you to that same understanding might've lead you to another conclusion.)
Would you or anyone else care to list the ideas on LW that cannot be reduced to refrigerator magnet/bumper sticker/memorable stand-up comedy routine level?
MWI, Aumann's Agreement Theorem, Great Filter concerns for existential risk, anthropic arguments in general, Bayes's Theorem in the non-finite case. But even these are not in general high priority issues for rationality. I think it is fair to say that most of the important ideas can have bumpersticker size statements. But, the level of unpacking may be so large from the bumpersticker forms that they only reason the bumpersticker form seems to do anything useful is just illusion of transparency.
Think of it as an enticing slogan, then. Or a tagline. Something to lure the lure-able. People read 600-page books based on back-cover blurbs, and they do so on a whim, at an airport.
Off the top of my head, the first thing that comes to mind is: supergoals and how to assess them. Second: the process of figuring out how to parse a true utility function from a fake utility function.
Yes, but I do not need this information to get through an average day. Rationality is --or should be -- for regular people, and very few regular people need to worry about the curvature of the universe in an average day.
Requiring rationality to be restricted to an aversion to edge-cases limits its usefulness to the point of being almost entirely without value.
To relate this more directly: that flat-spacetime thing is very relevant to understanding how "something" can come from "nothing". Which touches on how we all got here -- a very important, existentially speaking, question. One that can have an impact on even the 'ordinary' person's 'average day'. After all; if it turns out there's no reason for anyone to believe in a God, then many of the things many people do or say on a daily basis become... extraneous at best.
Furthermore: one of the things that instrumental rationality as an approach needs to have in its "toolkit" is the ability to deeply examine thoughts, ideas, and events in advance and from those examinations create heuristics ("rules of thumb") that enable us to make better decisions. That requires the use of sometimes very 'technical' turns of phrase. It's simply unavoidable.
That gets all the more true when you're trying to convey a very precise thought about a very nuanced topic. The thing is, regardless of where one looks in life there are more levels of complexity than we normally pay attention to. But that doesn't make those levels of complexity irrelevant; it just means that we abstract that complexity away in our 'average' lives. Enter said heuristics.
Part of instrumental rationality as an approach, I believe, is the notion of at least occassionally breaking down into their constituent parts the various forms of complexity we usually ignore, in order to try to come up with better abstractions with which to ignore said complexity when it shouldn't be a focus of our attention. I've gotten in "trouble" here on lesswrong for making similar statements before, however -- (though to add nuance that was more about whether generalizations are appropriate in a given 'depth' of conversation.)
Do you honestly believe that an average person is ever going to do any of that, in the way you just described, without being raised from birth in a world precisely tailored to make it easier for them to do so?
So far.
I actually laughed out loud at this one.
Sure, but by the time universe curvature is a "trending topic," we'll probably have artificially enhanced brains anyway. Until that day comes...
It may have been worthwhile for it to have been split into several posts, perhaps?
Could you do me a favor and elaborate? One thing I know for sure is that the quicker I'm writing, the longer my sentences are (a terrible habit). But I don't know if that's what you're talking about or if it's something else.
Again, for all LW commenters, not just you:
I'm sorry. You are obviously a really knowledgeable person. Content comes first, you've obviously got that down. But if I've only got, like, 5 cognitive dollars to spend on LW per day, then I can't blow it all on a single comment.
Bottom line: don't write "for high schoolers to hit university seniors." Write for third graders to hit me.
Please, I know it feels gross. But just try it. It's all in the recommendations above, thanks to Luke.
No apology needed, I appreciate the feedback. My comments often come out looking longer or wordier than they seemed while I was composing them, and I'll try to remember that tendency and keep a lid on it when possible.
Thanks for listening, but... when is it not possible?
I assume there are also limits to the amount of cognitive effort anyone wants to spend writing comments.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but yes, there are.
I'm not being sarcastic. Sometimes writing in a way that's easy for other people to understand is just hard. Speaking for myself, normally when my own comments aren't clear it's because I've spent as much time as I'm willing to spend on writing a comment trying to come up with clearer ways to convey my idea, not because it feels gross or because I'm not trying. (For example, I rewrote that last sentence at least 4 times and it's still pretty clunky.) This seems to come as second nature to some people, the rest of us have to struggle a bit.
None of this is intended to detract from your point. Clearer writing is better.
Yeah, what saturn said, pretty much. And as comments from Desrtopa and pedanterrific in this thread suggest, not everyone finds my writing as opaque as you do. If I can make my writing 10% clearer by spending double the effort on it, I'm only occasionally going to think that's a good tradeoff (particularly when the writing in question is blog comments and not, say, my professional work).
That's reasonable, but the unintended consequence is an evaporative cooling of people who won't do the work to read what you've written. This way, LW grows ever more incomprehensible to outsiders.
Forgive me, but this seems like a little bit of an overreaction. You're the only one who's called me out for writing style (although I have no trouble believing that others have thought the same thing and not said it). Frankly, I don't comment much, but when I do, my comments tend to be reasonably highly rated.
The incomprehensible-to-outsiders thing strikes me as a reach. LW by all appearances is growing rapidly without noticeable worsening in the quality of discourse or community, which is a remarkable accomplishment. When outsiders do complain about LW being unapproachable, it's not because of people like me writing long sentences. It's because of jargon, a lot of shared background that takes time to catch up on, and the novelty of some of the ideas.
I've already said I will make a reasonable effort to do better. So, respectfully, with that promise, I think I've shouldered enough responsibility for improving colloquy around here for the time being.
(Because I don't know how well in control of my tone I am, I want to clarify that I appreciate your feedback on my commenting style, and I very much do not want to come across as annoyed or snippy.)
You have absolutely shouldered enough responsibility. That's why I keep apologizing for picking on you.
If LW's goal is to attract a dozen (or however many) new members a month with the same basic capabilities, then yes, they are accomplishing that goal. Discourse remains qualitatively steady.
The top 1%, in effect, get wealthier. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
This particular comment seemed just fine to me...