Some Vision, More Revision

People say "Advice is cheap" to imply that at least some of it should be ignored. Writing advice is no exception. Your mother might recommend you buy a thesaurus. Friends may tell you to avoid starting sentences with 'I' or 'but'. Faculty urge you to write about something you believe in. Unfortunately, very little advice about writing will have much impact on your writing style unless you do the one thing that all accomplished writers do: revise.

Because most purveyors of writing advice are not linguists, Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker's perspective on revision caught my eye as I was re-reading his book The Language Instinct (1994) for a course I am preparing. In his chapter titled "The Language Mavens", Pinker swiftly debunks a couple of dozen language myths that ruffle the feathers of the self-appointed guardians of English--travesties such as slang, dialect variation, and semantic drift--all of which are endearing features of healthy, living languages. Although the language mavens are nearly always wrong about spoken language as it relates to the rise and fall of civilizations, Pinker ends his chapter with a brief but important nod to the difference between written and spoken language:

"The aspect of language use that is most worth changing is the clarity and style of written prose. Expository writing requires language to express far more complex trains of thought than it was biologically designed to do...Overcoming one's natural egocentricism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks in writing well. All this makes writing a difficult craft that must be mastered through practice, instruction, feedback, and--probably most important--intensive exposure to good examples. There are excellent manuals of composition that discuss these and other skills with great wisdom, like Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and William's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. What is most relevant to my point is how removed their practical advice is from the trivia of split infinitives and slang. For example, a banal but universally acknowledged key to good writing is to revise extensively. Good writers go through anywhere from two to twenty drafts before releasing a paper. Anyone who does not appreciate this necessity is going to be a bad writer. Imagine a Jeremiah exclaiming, 'Our language today is threatened by an insidious enemy: the youth are not revising their drafts enough times.' Kind of takes the fun out, doesn't it? It's not something that can be blamed on television, rock music, shopping mall culture, overpaid athletes, or any of the other signs of the decay of civilization. But if it's clear writing we want, this is the kind of homely remedy that is called for." (p. 401-402)