语言与文风2017newrepublic.com编辑精选
语法警察：语言卫道士的谬误（1994）
Grammar Puss: The fallacies of the language mavens (1994)
导读
这是 Pinker 1994 年批评"语言卫道士"（如 William Safire）的文章：规定性语法规则常是站不住脚的谬误，真正重要的是把意思表达清楚。对写作者来说，它提醒我们别把精力花在遵守教条上，而要花在有效传达上。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
语法规则的价值在于服务表达，而不是反过来——先问"读者能否听懂"，再问"这合不合规范"。
- 02
好想法如果写不清楚，就等于不存在；把观点讲明白的能力本身就是写作的核心竞争力。
- 03
判断一条语言规则该不该遵守，看它是否真的妨碍理解；纯粹维护"纯正"的规则可以大胆放弃。
- 04
学写作可以拆解你欣赏的作者（Pinker、Orwell、Dijkstra、Paul Graham），看他们如何把复杂想法压缩成清晰句子。
HN 评论精选
想法再好也无法自动传播，写作能力才是让观点被看见的关键。
有趣的是我读完全文才意识到这很像 Pinker 的《语言本能》，结尾才发现作者就是他，所以除了一点之外没有新东西。真正让我感兴趣的是：重要的不是规则，而是作为写作者或说话者表达自己——而这恰恰是多数人做得很差的。Pinker 写得好，Hitchens 写得好，Orwell 极擅长把想法压缩成清晰明白的文字；我们这位 Dijkstra 大概主要因无论什么话题都能写得极清楚而受推崇；Hacker News 上的 Paul Graham 作为文章作者的成功，在我看来八成靠写作能力，两成靠真正有价值的想法。这归结到对我最关键的一点：想法再好，如果你传达不出来，它们只会待在棚子里撑着蛛网。你也许运气好，有别人替你说出来。如果语言教育只能聚焦"一件事"，那就是有效地把观点讲出去。
chrisdone查看英文原文
Funny I read the whole thing thinking that this is like The Language Instinct by Pinker and then at the end saw it was by him. That explains why nothing but one point in it was new to me. The point that did spark my interest was that it's not rules that are important but expressing yourself as a writer (or speaker), which most people are poor at. Pinker is good, Christopher Hitchens was good, George Orwell was excellent at condensing ideas down into clear, lucid pros. Our own Dijkstra is probably admired mostly for his ability to write so clearly regardless of the topic. Hacker News's Paul Graham's success as an author of articles seems to me to be 80% his writing abilities and 20% actual valuable ideas. That comes down to the really important point for me. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are if you can't communicate them, they'll just sit in the shed propping up cobwebs. You may get lucky and someone else does it for you. If there's a "one thing" that language teaching efforts should be focused on, it's getting your point across effectively.
规定性规则的价值在于维系跨时间跨距离的可理解性，不能一味否定。
我和妻子常讨论这个。她属于"描述性规则"阵营，我介于两者之间。规定性规则的好处是：语言不会随时间或距离而丢失语境。我原本希望网络的普及能让沟通更容易、语言能成熟到我们可以无障碍阅读历史文献。结果恰恰相反：大众使用的语言似乎演化得更快，我们的沟通能力不如从前，而且在更小的词库里更不慎重地选词。也许只是我老了、爱抱怨了。
drblast查看英文原文
My wife and I discus this all the time. She's in the "descriptive rules" camp, and I straddle the line. The advantage to prescriptive rules for language is that you don't lose the context of a language over time or distance. My hope was that the popularity of the web would make it easier to communicate and understand each other, and also that languages would mature to the point where we could read historical documents without a language barrier. Instead, it seems like language in popular use seems to have evolved more quickly, we're not as good at communication as before, and we collectively choose our words less carefully out of a smaller pool. Or maybe I'm just getting old and cranky.
规范往往源自对成功实践的事后描述，被误当成了必须遵守的法则。
这让我想到音乐理论。我曾以为西方音乐的元素（大调小调、功能）是规定性的，后来才明白最具开创性的乐理著作原本是描述性的，之后才被当成规定。伟大的艺术家找到创新的做法，理论最终因无法用一套连贯规则覆盖所有流行音乐而碎片化，尽管各流派共享大量惯用法。特别有意思的是，音乐其实说不上传达思想，那它为何一开始就有惯用法，实在是个谜。
acjohnson55查看英文原文
This reminds me a lot of music theory. I used to think of the elements of western music as being prescriptive, like major and minor keys and functions. But I came to understand that the most groundbreaking treatises on music theory were originally descriptive, before becoming understood as prescriptive. Great artists found ways to innovate new practices, and eventually theory began to fragment as it became seemingly impossible to create a coherent set of rules to cover all popular music, even though so many idioms are shared between genres. And what's particularly fascinating to me is the fact that music can't really even be said to communicate ideas. So it's a bit of a mystery why it should have idioms to begin with. And yet...
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