The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

Author:Steven Pinker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Vladimir Nabokov never won a Nobel Prize.

Vladimir Nabokov never won an Oscar.

The sentences in the left-hand column all deny a proposition that it would be reasonable for readers to entertain. A whale looks like a big fish; Obama has been the subject of rumors about his religion; Nabokov was denied the Nobel Prize in Literature that many critics thought he deserved. Experiments have shown that statements like the ones in the left column, which deny a plausible belief, are easier to understand than statements in the right column, which deny an implausible belief. The first reaction to reading a sentence on the right is, “Who would ever have thought it was?” (Or she was? Or he did?) Negative sentences are easy when the reader already has an affirmative in mind or can create one on short notice; all he has to do is pin a “false” tag onto it. But concocting a statement that you have trouble believing in the first place (such as “A herring is a mammal”), and then negating it, requires two bouts of cognitive heavy lifting rather than one.

And now we see why the opening to A History of Warfare is so puzzling. Keegan began by denying a proposition that was not particularly compelling to the reader in the first place (and which became no more compelling upon further explanation). The same is true for the two baffling sentences I used on page 140, the ones about moderate drinkers and Serbian intervention. In all these cases, the reader is apt to think, “Who ever thought it was?” When an author has to negate something that a reader doesn’t already believe, she has to set it up as a plausible belief on his mental stage before she knocks it down. Or, to put it more positively, when a writer wants to negate an unfamiliar proposition, she should unveil the negation in two stages:

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