Illustration by Jordan Awan

In a prologue to “The Sense of Style,” subtitled “A Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,” the brain scientist Steven Pinker explains that he’s been reading style manuals of late, and that they bum him out. Strunk and White had “a tenuous grasp of grammar,” and George Orwell contradicted himself. Guides tend to fall back on “folklore and myth.” And for what purpose? Grammar busybodies and their “diktats” should be obsolete. “Today’s writers are infused by the spirit of scientific skepticism and the ethos of questioning authority,” Pinker writes. “We have a body of research on the mental dynamics of reading: the waxing and waning of memory load as readers comprehend a passage, the incrementing of their knowledge as they come to grasp its meaning, the blind alleys that can lead them astray.” Diehard copy editors might itch to change that initial “by” to “with” (infused with what, exactly?), and to point out that blind alleys, by definition, don’t lead anywhere. But diehard copy editors are the villains here. We all know what Pinker is trying to tell us, even if his sentences do not add up.

Some skimmings from the final part of Pinker’s book ran in the Guardian last month, under the provocative headline “10 ‘Grammar Rules’ It’s OK To Break (Sometimes).” It is a brazen document. Armed with examples from pop culture and from the literary canon, Pinker tries to shoot down some basic principles of English grammar (such as the distinction between “who” and “whom”), some looser stylistic preferences (such as the recommendation against splitting infinitives), and some wholly permissible things widely rumored to be wrong (such as beginning sentences with “but” or “and”). He even takes aim at conventions enforced only in American English (introducing restrictive clauses with “that” and nonrestrictive clauses with “which”), which must have left some Guardian readers even more perplexed than they thought they were.

When it comes to language, many people distinguish between “prescriptivism” (the idea that correct usage should be defined by authorities) and “descriptivism” (the idea that any way a lot of people use the language is correct). Pinker, who has felt unfairly dismissed as a descriptivist, says that his new usage does not reflect either camp. It’s better. “Standards of usage are desirable in many arenas of communication,” he writes, and yet “many prescriptive rules originated for screwball reasons.” The cause is noble, and Pinker approaches it gamely. Most of his amendments, though, actually make the language more confused.

English is complex. To help reduce ambiguity, modern usage attaches specific words to specific functions. The restrictive-nonrestrictive division between “that” and “which”—two particularly common and shifty words—is one attempt at clarity. Another is the rule that “like” joins noun phrases, while “as” or “as if” is for verb phrases. (“It looks as if my date is here!” “You look like Mom in that dress.”) Pinker doesn’t see the point of that one, either. Why shouldn’t we use “like” as we please, he asks, as it’s been used in “literary works by dozens of great writers (including William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, HG Wells and William Faulkner)”? He offers versions of this justification—if Faulkner did it so can you—in both the article and his book. At one point in “The Sense of Style,” Pinker urges us to follow the example of his novelist wife.

In doing so, he seems to be confusing literary style (the qualities that distinguish Faulkner from Hemingway) with usage style (the qualities that distinguish The New Yorker’s_ _comma deployment from the Times’s). It’s an easy mistake to make, and yet mixing up the qualities of these two kinds of “style”—aesthetics on the one hand, consistency on the other—leads to weird conclusions. Too often, Pinker makes choices about usage on aesthetic grounds. He says that his new rules are graceful, but the standards of grace seem to be mainly his own.

It’s for grammatical consistency, not beauty or gentilesse, for example, that correct English has us say “It was he” instead of “It was him.” Pinker calls this offense “a schoolteacher rule” that is “a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar, and syntax with semantics.” He’s done crucial research on language acquisition, and he offers an admirable account of syntax in his book, but it is unclear what he’s talking about here. As he knows, the nominative and accusative cases are the reason that we don’t say gibberish like “Her gave it to he and then sat by we here!” No idea is more basic to English syntax and grammar. In the phrase “It was he,” “it” and “he” are the same thing: they’re both the subject, and thus nominative. This is not “Latin.” (Our modern cases had their roots in tribal Germanic.) The same is true of “who” and “whom,” another nominative-accusative pair to which Pinker objects, sort of. He writes, “The best advice to writers is to calibrate their use of ‘whom’ to the complexity of the construction and the degree of formality they desire.” Yet who wants to undertake that calibration all the time? The glorious thing about the “who” and “whom” distinction is that it’s simple.

This tendency to add complexity, ambiguity, and doubt is a troubling feature of Pinker’s rules. He fights pedantry with more pedantry. He doesn’t want to concede that the phrase “very unique” makes no sense (things are either unique or not), so he mounts an odd defense. Look at two snowflakes from far away, he says, and they no longer seem unique: “The concept ‘unique’ is meaningful only after you specify which qualities are of interest to you and which degree of resolution or grain size you’re applying.” If we did all that, we wouldn’t need the word.

At such times, it is difficult to shake the suspicion that Pinker’s list of “screwball” rules simply seeks to justify bad habits that certain people would rather not be bothered to unlearn. “Fewer” versus “less”? Do whatever sounds good, Pinker says, but maybe favor “fewer,” if you can, but not because “less” is wrong. Good luck! Dangling modifiers? Pinker likes them, sometimes. (His criteria are too elaborate to be described.) He stresses the importance of matching usage to what feels “natural” and intuitive. But natural and intuitive for whom? The kind of syntax that’s natural to kids growing up in a Maine bungalow isn’t the same as the syntax that feels natural in East New York.

That ought to be a good thing. Writers able to choose their working languages—Joseph Conrad, Jorie Graham, Vladimir Nabokov—often end up writing in English, because, as Conrad reportedly put it, “English is so plastic.” American language digests everything, in all directions. (Few other tongues would let you seize a bottle of whisky with chutzpah, drink it with louche abandon, and get down with the party.) And it’s given rise to special innovations. Consider the extra grammatical “aspects” of African-American English, the “be” aspects conveying habitual states, which add descriptive precision and nuance. (Eddie Murphy: “Elvis was forty-two years old, remember, right before he croaked?... His butt be sticking out.”) Problems arise only when vernaculars don’t intersect—when, say, the West Coast twentysomething asks her Bostonian boss to bring “hella” doughnuts to the meeting.

“Correct” usage is our translation tool. The written language isn’t supposed to eclipse the variety of American English, but it’s not meant to comprise the full range, either. It’s a lingua franca, based on clear and common rules: anybody who makes it to high school can learn to use the written language correctly and be broadly understood. When you write a letter to the White House, you don’t need to worry about making context calibrations—not grammatical ones, anyway—because the rules are there. Pinker’s insistence that written language loosen to reflect natural American idiom is parochial: there’s too wide a range of idiom to be captured in one style. Better that everybody speak his or her own forms, and then use “good” English, too. If ambitious writers work at the boundaries of the written language (as they should), then they ought do it from a path of mastery, not ignorance; broken rules carry no power if writers and readers don’t notice the transgressions. Proper usage shows us where the earth is, so that, when the time comes, we know what it means to fly.