Criticism and Defensive Writing

Steven Pinker criticized the tendency of many writers to be vague and imprecise, to “use hedges in the vain hope that it will get them off the hook”. Why have so many disclaimers, asks Pinker. After all, in a real world conversation:

“If someone tells you that Liz wants to move out of Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t interpret him as claiming that it rains there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just because he didn’t qualify his statement with relatively rainy or somewhat rainy. Any adversary who is intellectually unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway.”

Couldn’t agree more.

Paul Chiusano points out that the Internet aggravates this defensive style because “we’re effectively contorting our communication style to defend against a small minority of mean-spirited and uncharitable actions by some”. And so we end up with:

“Boring writing stripped of a lot of…personal style.”

Such defensive writing has another consequences:

““Avoiding saying something wrong” becomes a primary focus of the writing, rather than communicating or exploring ideas which the author might himself be unsure of. It encourages a tendency to be attached to ideas and defend them against attackers, rather than letting ideas exist separate from ourselves as they should.”

Ideally, we’d want a world that follows this policy suggested by another commenter:

“Find the insight, not the error.”

But I guess we live in a world where most people choose to be the way that Calvin told Hobbes:

“That's a lot more mature than I think I care to be.”