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You can’t blame the pontiff for pontificating, but his tips annoyed me
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. Continue reading...