Perhaps I'm asking a question?

I've just finished reading a book called 'Statistics without tears' by Derek Rowntree. It's a basic tutorial on statistical concepts focussing on the ideas and principles, rather than walking through actual calculations in any detail. I found it useful and would recommend. But I'm here to talk about language, not statistics! 

The book is written in what I would describe as a very 'careful' style. You know it - the way older academic writers tend to, with quite precise attention to punctuation. Even though the tone of this book was very informal, friendly and not at all stuffy, I felt that every colon and dash was considered. 

So it was interesting to me that both times Rowntree used a sentence in the form Perhaps you recall..., he ended it with a question mark: Perhaps you recall the idea of a confidence interval? (p.183). I've had a quick look around the internet and can't find much on this topic other than a few sites peeving about the use of a question mark with perhaps, saying that it is not necessary and therefore wrong. There are people asking about it in English forums, indicating that it's something that might feel natural. 

It seems likely, then, that it's a 'declarative question' - the same as if he'd written You recall the idea of a confidence interval?. These are common enough, though definitely I would say a feature of less formal writing, just as contractions like I'll or don't are, which Rowntree also uses throughout. But it is interesting that he doesn't use this form - he uses perhaps. The question mark itself is enough to allow the reader to see that it's a question, and to therefore know that they are not being told that they do recall the idea, but rather prompted to agree that yes, they do recall that idea. So perhaps adds a bit more prompting, a bit more questioning, a bit more possibility of you not in fact recalling the idea of a confidence interval but that's absolutely fine because it was a few chapters ago and it's complicated stuff so don't worry. 

Have you eaten Grandma? (review)

Cover of 'Have you eaten Grandma?'
by Gyles Brandreth

I was considering writing a review of this book, Have you eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth, but to be quite honest it's not worth bothering.
[Edit: I ended up writing a review of it anyway so here you go.]

It's neither surprisingly good nor toe-curlingly awful. I got it for professional purposes (I'm teaching a module on 'Grammar for Everyone' this term and want to look at all sorts of books that claim to be about 'grammar') and I'll get something out of it for that, I suppose, but I'm glad I didn't buy it for pleasure.

I had been ready to be cross about it after seeing this little video in which Gyles (known as being a pedant, has done truly awfully smug programmes about language in the past) talks about some of his 'bugbears' including redundant myself, can I get rather than may I get, and so on. In fact, it's exactly what you expect.

The majority of it is punctuation advice. It's fine, with only a few mistakes, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves is better if that's what you want. Then there's lists of words, either just ones he likes or ones that people often get wrong in writing (accept vs except, for instance) and mnemonics (sometimes very weird ones) to help remember them.

He has a bizarre joy in some -- but not all -- neologisms. He seems to have (like Stephen Fry) come around from pure prescriptivism to the joys of what he calls 'slang' some time in the 1990s, and so he loves things from then. He's constantly saying End of, for example, like at the end of the video above. He gives a long list of initialisms like WTF (which he loves) and describes some of them as being of 'the Whatsapp and Snapchat generation', which needless to say were totally unfamiliar to the teenager I asked. And yet he is so rigidly inflexible about some things that he was taught were correct, and so are immutable rules for him (you mustn't ever, ever say bored of, for example, despite the fact that there's no harm in it whatsoever and millions of people do say it).

There's an embarrassing section of the abbreviations part where he talks about labels for gender and sexuality that verge on poking fun at LGBTQIA-type initialisms. He shows a clear support for non-binary, non-straight identification, but still betrays an opinion of 'simply straight' being 'normal' and 'knowing where you are'. The section on American vs British English is terrible, and relies only the books of people like him, not linguists. This is not a book that seeks to promote truth.

This is very evident throughout, when he often refers to 'the Brandreth Rule' on particular points. This means that he knows that there are different ways of doing things, and his arbitrary choice is the one he likes the best. That's what this book is. It's for people aged about 50 or 60, who 'love the English language', and just want someone who agrees with them to reinforce their opinions and tell them the things they already know so that they can be smug about knowing them. I've come to realise that anyone who says they 'love the English language' doesn't really love the English language, not as it really is. They love some idealised version of it, the version they speak, the version they think is 'best', and which is being 'corrupted' by Americans, kids, foreigners, or modern education.

It's a perfectly acceptable, slightly dull book. If you want to learn some stuff about punctuation or commonly confused words, then it's one way of doing that (but not the best way). If you just want an authority to refer to on certain style points, it'll do that (but there are better authorities to refer to). It's not the best of any of the things it does, but it is by Gyles Brandreth, and that is its selling point. End of. (Sorry, that was such a lazy way to end this but I couldn't resist.)

For certain it's categorically a tautology

Here's post number two in the series from Jo Nesbo's The Leopard. In this extract, one character says "I know for certain of others with the selfsame reputation who categorically are not" (my emphasis).

The other chap tells him that using both the expressions for certain and categorically is a tautology. It's not, of course. They do mean the same thing (here, at least - categorically can also mean other things), but they don't refer to the same bit of the sentence. For certain applies to know, so Gjendem is certain about the state of his knowledge. Categorically applies to are not, i.e. to their state of being rather than to his knowledge. This doesn't mean that an editor might not suggest rewriting for stylistic reasons (after all, it means the same without either phrase), but it's not a tautology.

Steven Pinker at the Royal Institution

I went to a talk by Steven Pinker to promote his book, The Sense of Style. It was held at the Royal Institution, which is a science institution and this book is probably the least scientific thing Pinker has ever written, but still. I went along because although I'm now enough of a linguist to know that Steven Pinker is not some kind of god, his book The Language Instinct is still indirectly the reason I'm now a linguist (I read it aged 15 or so and found it fascinating, and that was my first introduction to linguistics). I took my copy along to sign and he very graciously did so despite me not buying a copy of the one he was plugging.

The talk itself will be available to watch on the Ri channel so I needn't summarise it too thoroughly. Pinker was a very entertaining speaker, with lots of jokes that most of the audience didn't seem to have heard before (I had heard them but still laughed because he tells them well). He began with the standard 'everyone has always said language is degenerating' bit, and the 'look how silly most style advice is'. So far, so expected. But the interesting part was when he got onto his own advice.

Digression: style guides serve one useful purpose, which is to ensure consistency within a particular publication. So the Guardian, for example, has a style guide, and it means that the writing of many different people published in the Guardian follows the same rules (usually). It's a slightly different style from the New York Times, but that too is internally consistent. Everyone knows the rules are arbitrary to some extent (else they'd all be the same), but the important thing is to follow the ones for whoever you're writing for. Therefore, style guides that lay out pernickety rules as if they're gospel are never going to be useful. They just cater for nervous writers who think there is a right way to do things that they need to know. People who think they need style guides really just need to read more and to have more confidence in their command of language, not to be told they're doing it wrong.

So this was why I thought it was odd that Pinker had done a style guide at all: what makes him think that his advice is any more likely to stand the test of time than Strunk and White's, now hopelessly outdated? While he did have some arbitrary peeves (he seems not to like the intensifier use of literally, for example, which is currently 'wrong' but very common and no doubt on its way to being unremarkable), his main focus was on the big picture. This is unusual in style guide land and, I would guess, more along the lines of what you'd get if you took a writing course (I've never taken one so I don't know, but I'm assuming they don't teach you not to split infinitives). But developing a good, readable, accessible style is of course much more what 'style guides' should help with, rather than minor grammar issues.

He promised that there would be insights from cognitive science and linguistics. I'm not sure how much there was from linguistics in the talk (perhaps there was, and I missed it as it's too familiar to me?) but his main point was that a good writer uses 'classic prose' style. I'd never heard this term before, but having now googled it a little bit, it seems that it's related to something called 'plain style'. I'm not totally clear on what each is - either classic style is a fancier version of plain style, or else it's plain style with some sophisticated thought. Either way, classic style apparently has clarity as its main aim. This is obviously a very good aim. Pinker criticised 'academese' among others as being very verbose and not at all clear, and much of it is, but I always aim for simplicity and clarity and encourage simplicity for the sake of clarity in my students' work. The focus is on the thing being shown and guiding the reader with not too much hedging, narrating a story.

The cognitive science part came when he compared this to the idea of knowing what someone else knows (theory of mind, illustrated by the Smarties tube task or the Sally-Anne task). Bad writers, he said, can't forget that just because they know some jargon or fact doesn't mean that others also know it. Good writers are better at putting themselves in other people's shoes and bringing the reader along with them.

This was pretty cool, and also linked into a hoary old chestnut of style advice: passive voice. He demonstrated how narrating a story means that sometimes it's better to use active and sometimes passive, so it's silly to say never to use passive. But he also said that passive voice is more common in bad writing. Why? Because bad writers work backwards from their own knowledge and don't properly tell a story in order, beginning from the position of not knowing something.

I hope I haven't spoilt all the good bits of the book. I'm putting it on my reading lists, as I think it'll be useful for students. Their 'curse of knowledge' is different, though: rather than being unable to forget that they know something and wrongly assuming their reader does too, they are unable to forget that their reader does know the material and feel as though they don't need to explain it. And although I didn't feel exactly that I learnt something, as such, the talk did make some subconscious knowledge conscious and that always makes it easier to apply it. But don't analyse the writing in this blog post because I publish these totally unedited (because time) so the style is bound to be all over the place.

Obviously

In the Guardian, ages ago now, Stephen Poole defended 'basically' against the charges brought against it by Harris Academy in Upper Norwood:* 

The case of "basically" is similar to that of "obviously", also regularly dismissed as vapid huffery. I once worked at a newspaper where an editor sought to eliminate all use of "obviously" from the pages, on the grounds that, as he wrote: "If it's obvious, there's no need to say it."
This sounds pithily convincing until you consider common rhetorical strategies. Very often, it helps to state the obvious before moving on to more debatable claims that you will argue follow from it. To signal this, one may preface the statement with the word "Obviously", as an economical way of saying: "I know you know this, for it is obvious, and you are no fool, but the rest of my argument depends on our agreeing on this, so I beg your indulgence for stating it at the beginning; if you can be patient just a little longer, I promise I will at length have something more interesting to say." In this way, the use of "obviously", like that of "basically", is a little show of deference, a drop of conversational lubricant.

This kind of thing catches my eye when I mark essays. I always, without fail, cross out words like basically, obviously and so on, for the same reason Poole attributes to his editor. In my opinion (and it is just my opinion, as it's a style choice, even though I'm obviously right), these words do not belong in formal academic writing at all. I wonder if this is a reflection of linguistic style. In some disciplines, I think rhetorical flourishes are prized but linguistics likes a very pared-down, spare style, with no fiddle-faddle. To linguists, elegance means simplicity. That means that everything included is there for a reason, and so you don't need obviously in the way Poole describes it.

*For a comment on the idiotic and unnecessary re-spelling of woz in their poster, see this post.

Gove's random writing style rules

Michael Gove has been the subject of this blog in the past. These days, he's no longer Education bod and is now Lord Chancellor, if you can believe that. Because this job apparently doesn't involve much actual work, he's got a lot of time on his hands and is spending it complaining about the way people write and making lists of things his people should do or not do when they respond to letters.

His list of things is a mixture of surprisingly sensible advice on general style (don't be repetitive, don't be pompous, be nice and thank people for their letters), content (refer to the inherited economic situation at every opportunity) and really random concerns about punctuation and grammar.

He also seems to have been influenced by Strunk and White, as his advice also includes 'if in doubt, cut it out' (which is good advice if you are writing formal documents), and 'in letters, adjectives add little, adverbs even less'. (There is a point here, although it cannot be taken too literally, as 'little', 'even' and 'less' are all adjectives or adverbs.)

According to the Independent article I linked above, his 'rules' include the following:

Use active voice and present tense. 

This is a well-worn rule. It's good advice in some ways, because people do sometimes use passive sentences to 'pad out' their writing, but there's so much nonsense written about it and people are so demonstrably unable to tell what's active and passive anyway (scroll down to section 3 at that link for examples), it's not actually very helpful advice.

Don't use 'impact' as a verb.

Lots of people have peeves about words that were originally nouns being used as verbs. That's fine. It's illogical, because so many of our verbs were originally nouns it seems silly to pick out just one or two, but whatever. I think it's because this particular one is perceived as a 'management-speak' buzzword, which is indeed annoying.

Don't use contractions.

Fair enough. Formal writing does usually avoid contractions (so 'don't' should be 'do not', for example). I used to enforce this quite strictly in student essays, but these days I let it go, as I recently noted, because I'm on a mission to discourage the lumpen, clumsy, underconfident writing style I see too much of. I don't know what kind of letters these civil servants write; if it's very formal then they should follow Gove's rule, but if they want to adopt the 'warm tone' he elsewhere encourages, I'd use contractions.

While 'best-placed' and 'high-quality' are joined with a dash, very few others are. 

Bit of a weird thing to say. There are well-established rules about when you use a hyphen. There are some that are a matter of preference, such as with prefixes (so some newspapers prefer to hyphenate 're-think' while others prefer 'rethink'), and these are (or should be) flexible enough to allow for violations in cases of potential ambiguity. If we turn to examples of the type Gove cites, there is a rule: 'best-placed' and 'high-quality' are spelt with a hyphen if they are used attributively (which basically means before a noun, like I used 'well-established' just now) and not if they are used predicatively (which basically means after a verb like 'to be', as in 'the rules are well established'). You would not write 'the food is very high-quality', for instance. So it's daft to pick out two random examples and incorrectly state that they always have a hyphen and incorrectly state that others don't, when you could just follow the correct way we're all already doing it. But hey - what do I know.

Don't use 'unnecessary' capitalisations.

Agree. Some people like to use capitals to make words seem more important, I think. Capitalisation rules are pretty arbitrary (compare English with German, which capitalises nouns) and it has changed even since I was at school (when I was taught to capitalise seasons), but there are rules and not following them makes you look like you don't know them.

Replace 'ensure' with 'make sure'.

OK. Random, but I guess it seems simpler.

Don't start a sentence with 'however'. 

As I recently wrote, 'however' is tricky. Sometimes people introduce a silly rule in order to rule out a genuinely incorrect usage without having to explain its complexity, but in the process rule out a lot of other correct usages. 'Don't end a sentence with a preposition' used to be one of these. I have a strong suspicion that the common ban on first person pronouns in essays is one too - if students can't write 'I', they can't write stupid waffly phrases like 'I believe that'. Likewise, banning sentence-initial 'however' would also rule out some incorrect used of 'however'. But it would not catch those I complained about in my post linked above, and it would rule out a lot of perfectly fine ones. So I think this another Strunk & White rule, who apparently allow uses like 'However much you complain, I'm not going to stop doing it' but dislike it when it's used with a comma: 'However, we were unable to change her habits'. This is silly, out-of-date advice which will lead to old-fashioned, distant writing. I'm saying nothing about whether that says anything about Gove's character.

Gwynne, sexist language and causing offence

He's good value, that Gwynne chap. Two posts out of one little book which I haven't even read.

In his preface, Gwynne explains about his use of pronouns. He notes that 'he' used to be used for 'a member of the human race of either sex', but now is found offensive by 'some people' (here, he implicitly compares these overly sensitive people to those sensible women who used to use 'he' 'without hesitation or objection'). He (rightly) says that 'he or she' is 'disagreeably clumsy', but then irrationally dismisses singular 'they', a perfectly elegant and simple solution with good historical pedigree. His dismissal is based on nothing more than the 'authoritative' opinion of a style guide and Simon Heffer, who is a journalist, and whose work has been called 'staggeringly erroneous' and inconsistent by, you know, actual authorities on language (=linguists). So, he says, he will avoid generic 'he' where it is possible to do so, so as not to potentially annoy those namby pamby sensitive readers. However, avoiding it completely is beyond even Gwynne's considerable writing skills, and so sometimes, he must use it to avoid awkwardness. He says,

Please be assured, therefore, on the few occasions that you see the all-embracing 'he' or equivalent, that it is occurring without any offence being intended.

Oh, well, that's all right then. If he doesn't mean any offence, there won't be any offence. Permit me to make an extreme analogy, which I'll put under a break as it refers to highly offensive language (the 'n-word').

They almost literally never collide

Richard Dawkins said (in The greatest show on earth) of starlings,

They almost literally never collide. 

It struck me as an odd word order to use. Surely it should be

They literally almost never collide.

What's modifying what here? Well, in Dawkins' sentence (let's label it A), almost is modifying literally:

They [[almost literally] never] collide

He means that they rarely collide; he can't say that they literally never collide, but never is used in an almost literal sense here. OK, makes sense.

Or is it that almost modifies literally never?:

They [almost [literally never]] collide

That second one seems odd to me. I don't think it's possible for that to be the structure - I can't even quite see what it would mean. So it's the first then, with literally qualified by almost, and the whole constituent modifying never. The birds, in their massive flocks, are very good at not colliding. It's not quite true to say that they literally never collide, but they almost literally never do. Ignoring the fact that this is a slightly hyperbolic and quite superfluous use of literally, it's perfectly sound.

But if he had written sentence B instead, the modificational relations are clear: as we can't say that literally can modify almost, literally modifies the constituent almost never.

They [literally [almost never]] collide. 

Literally is used, as it so often is, for emphasis: he means they almost never collide, and he means that literally. He's not exaggerating. They really do almost never collide.

Syntactically, both are OK. Stylistically, I know which I prefer.