Pope Francis offered the staff of the Vatican some writing advice in September: “Give up using adjectives” – and also adverbs, as in phrases such as “authentically Christian”, to which he declared himself allergic. I suppose if there’s anyone you can’t condemn for pontificating like this, it’s the pontiff. Yet his advice annoyed me, as did some newly published tips aimed at scientists from the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who turns out to have been giving behind-the-scenes editorial advice to leading researchers for years. “Remove extra words or commas whenever you can,” reads McCarthy’s advice (as paraphrased by two of his academic collaborators). Also: “Don’t overelaborate.” Though he’s less of a stickler than Francis when it comes to adjectives: “Only use an adjective if it’s relevant.” In short, we’re back to William Strunk and EB White’s famous advice in The Elements Of Style: “Omit needless words.”

My issue with all this isn’t the fact that you can – who’d have guessed it? – find plenty of adjectives and adverbs in the pope’s own writing. Nor is it that McCarthy’s admonition against overelaboration is redundant. (Of course you shouldn’t overelaborate; that’s why they call it overelaboration.) As the linguist Geoff Pullum notes, “omit needless words” is a bit suspect, too, since clearly you shouldn’t omit needful words, so the word “needless” is itself needless. So “omit words” might make more sense, except that it’s stupid. No, my issue with all this advice to eliminate unnecessary verbiage is: unnecessary for what? Claims of necessity or superfluity imply some end goal, but it’s rare to see one explicitly stated.

After all, the complex scientific jargon that McCarthy disdains isn’t usually there, I’d argue, because the authors knew no better; it’s because their goal isn’t solely to communicate, but also to signal their knowledge and qualifications. (This is a bad goal to aim for, I’d say. But so long as academics have powerful incentives to do so, style advice won’t solve things.)

Meanwhile, a talented novelist can harness verbosity to good communicative ends. How many of the words in Lucy Ellman’s new 1,000-page novel Ducks, Newburyport are needful? For that matter, how many novels are needful at all? How many of the words ever written truly had to be written, other than signs saying things like “Dangerous cliff edge, keep away”, or “Warning: contains bleach”?

In any case, my hunch is that verbosity of the bad kind rarely arises because the writer hasn’t yet been told, whether by popes or novelists, to cut it out. Rather, it arises when you haven’t properly figured out what it is you’re trying to say. Whenever I’m stuck on how to express something – or I read my writing back, and have the feeling that it’s missing the point – the problem is never one of style. It’s that I haven’t clarified exactly what that point is, and that I’ve been engaged in a subconscious effort to avoid having to do so.

So instead of “omit needless words”, try “invest needful effort”. Make yourself do the job of pinpointing your message, in your own mind, and the writing will come easily. I mean, it probably will. Unlike some, I wouldn’t claim to be infallible.

Read this

Steven Pinker’s book The Sense Of Style draws on evolutionary theory to show you how to tailor your language to our millennia-old brains.