Last week we looked methodically into the various ways of properly negating a thought or idea, then ended with a cautionary advice that too much negation gets seriously in the way of good communication.
Before going deeper into the pitfalls of excessive negation, however, let’s first recognize its obviously useful aspects. Obviously, there’s no arguing against alarmist phrasing to emphasize clear and imminent danger:
“Caution! Don’t touch! High voltage!” “Danger! Don’t enter! Highly radioactive area!” We can also forgive lawyers or word-weasels for crafting such bullying statements as
“All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the author’s prior written permission” and
“No trespassing! Entry without authorization will subject intruders to criminal prosecution.” Negative communication of this kind has very useful shock appeal, but too much of it can be so irritating as to invite open resistance and hostility. In fact, psychological research has demonstrated that sustained negative messages foster doubt, mistrust, and discouragement in their receivers, making further communication with them increasingly difficult. This is why since the beginnings of language, people who needed other people’s cooperation would make every effort to find a more graceful—and fruitful— tact for expressing negation. Call it affirmative communication or diplomacy or public relations, but what it basically does is to use positive phrasing even for intrinsically negative messages.
The virtue of emphasizing the positive rather than the negative is easy to understand. Compare the messages in these statement-pairs:
“Don’t you dare do that!” (“Why not try doing this?”)
“I don’t think you know what you’re doing.” (“Are you sure you are doing the right thing?”)
“You cannot be relied upon to do anything properly!” (I wish I could rely more on you to do things properly.”) Emphasizing the negative heightens the expectation of failing to get the desired result; emphasizing the positive heightens the expectation of succeeding in getting it. One need not be a behavioral expert to predict which approach is the more likely ticket for success.
It should be clear now that negation in language is no small thing; it is too major a thing to trifle with by inserting a “no” or “not” all too casually into a positive statement. Indeed, it’s no accident that the English language had evolved so many ways of positively expressing negation. The wealth of words in English for affixal negation is, in fact, proof that over the centuries, users of the language had gone to great semantic lengths to avoid using an outright “no” or “not” when expressing negation. Thousands of new words were born with the negative aspect already built into them, making it so easy for us today to build positive, affirmative statements around negative messages.
Consider these statements that use “no” or “not,” and contrast them with their equivalents using
affixal negation or, better yet, deliberately positive semantics: “Have I not told you that it’s not necessary for you to make that trip?”
(“I said that trip might be unnecessary.”) “Even if your data are generally favorable, they are not yet sufficient, so you could not yet conclude that your theory is valid.”
(“The data to support your theory is still inconclusive.”) Lest we leave the subject of negation thinking that “no” and “not” are totally undesirable, we must now give due recognition to their supremely positive semantic virtue: their power to delicately flavor understatement, irony, euphemism, and other nonliteral forms of expression. Feel the pleasant undertow of this negative statement:
“He’s not exactly a saint.” Much better than the positive, straightforward “He’s a sinner,” don’t you think?
Indeed, by using the barest minimum of “no” and “not” in our writing, we can make ourselves much more effective and pleasant communicators in the English language.
This essay, 2111th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the August 11, 2022 digital edition of The Manila Times
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Avoiding excessive negation in our writing(Next week:
When the word “only” goes haywire) August 18, 2022
