Why it’s okay to boldly ignore the self-appointed gatekeepers of our language

Consider this, from Steven Pinker's new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century: "Recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all. They cannot construct a simple declarative sentence, either orally or in writing. They cannot spell common, everyday words. Punctuation is apparently no longer taught."

Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more, you (or I) might say. After all, evidence of decline in English usage is everywhere. Standards of general literacy are in freefall. Look around this newspaper, for example, and tell me how long it takes to find some blatant error of grammar, spelling, punctuation or usage.

Except that the quote dates from 1961, and is just one of several that Pinker plucks from the archives to justify his thesis that unease about writing standards has always been with us and is usually overstated and over-pessimistic.

In The Sense of Style, the cognitive scientist and bestselling author argues that there is no hard evidence at all that things are really getting worse . So my own gut feeling that things are on the slide is just a function of my own age and general grumpiness? "Well, it might be," Pinker responds. "There's a long history of editors and journalists who've felt that to be the case."

In The Sense of Style, Pinker is critical of those he calls "prescriptivists", self-appointed gatekeepers who see our language as governed by an immutable set of rules to be defended to the death against a menacing rabble of pop-addled kids and ditzy liberal educationalists who value self-expression over clarity.

There is, I suggest, a certain contradiction here. His own book is full of homespun, no-nonsense directives on everything from the appropriate use of the idiomatic American word “ain’t” to ridiculing those who insist that “decimate” can only mean “kill one in 10”. So he’s not averse to being a bit prescriptive himself, then.

"Yes, if it's done on the basis of reason. The problem is a lot of the rules are just wrong," he says. A favourite example is the split infinitive. Pedants around the world objected when Star Trek's James T Kirk vowed "to boldly go where no man has gone before". But, as Pinker points out, the rule is a heavy-handed attempt to shoehorn Latin grammar into the English language.

“There is not the slightest reason to interdict an adverb from the position before the main verb, and great writers in English have placed it there for centuries,” he writes.

The most valuable part of Pinker’s engaging and unpretentious language primer is rooted in his own field of cognitive linguistics. He doesn’t accept the received wisdom that professional elites, such as academics and corporate bureaucrats, deliberately make their language incomprehensible.

Rather, he suggests, they suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, “the difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know”. Our own clique becomes our universe, and it’s almost impossible to break out of that shared set of internalised assumptions.

The Sense of Style is presented as the latest in a long tradition of writing stylebooks, with the addition of contemporary scientific thinking on language and the workings of the human mind. Pinker himself says it is "designed for people who know how to write and want to write better".

Every writing style is a construct, but he argues for the merits of "classic style" – prose that rises above the purely functional to convey complex ideas with elegance as well as clarity. In this, he differs from many style guides of the last century, such as George Orwell's Politics and the English Language, with their uncompromising prohibitions on floweriness of any sort.

“The classical manuals, written by starchy Englishmen and rock-ribbed Yankees, try to take all the fun out of writing, grimly adjuring the writer to avoid offbeat words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration,” he writes.

Why all that Puritanism, I wonder. “I suspect it was a reaction to the over-adorned styles that preceded it,” says Pinker. “To the extent that the advice goes overboard, I suspect you can’t understand it without looking at the style of Victorian prose.”

The counterargument is that, without stern guardians about the place, we’ll soon descend to a level where nobody knows the meaning of “fulsome”, “refute” or “enormity” any more. In fact, we may already have arrived there.

“But I do think that happens less often than is feared,” Pinker says, pointing to the gradual transformation of the word “disinterested” from meaning impartial to meaning uninterested. “Both meanings will continue to survive in parallel.”

One of the most profound cultural changes of the past couple of decades has been that far more people now write for public consumption, by self-publishing through blogs or social media. Meanwhile, the gatekeepers who were once expected to correct errors and improve prose style are on the retreat, with fewer editors and proofreaders employed by publishers. This must surely result in an increase in sloppiness and mistakes. Pinker disagrees. “I’m surprised by the quality of a lot of online writing. Except the trolls obviously, but look at the quality of contributions on Wikipedia or recommendations on Amazon; it’s surprisingly good.”

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century is published byAllen Lane