Writing Tip

Don't Use Double Negatives (Unless You Know How To)

Difficulty Level: Basic

Recommendation: Although a double negative does not equal a positive, avoid using it in formal writing or speech.

A double negative equals a positive, right? Negative 1 times negative 1 equals a positive 1? In English composition, a double negative occurs when two negations inhabit the same sentence. For example, the sentence “I don’t have no money,” according to strict grammarians, is logically construed as “I have money.”

But this argument is not very logical. Language does not always abide by the rules of math—in this case, multiplication. To bolster their suppositions, elite grammarians deduce that double negatives are accidental emissions from uneducated people that have unfortunate and unintended meanings. Which is why the run-of-the-mill double negative cannot be employed in proper communication

There is another, more elevated type of double negative fit for formal communication: understatement.

Understatement

Understatement and artistic ambiguity may be cleverly achieved with a double negative. In rhetoric, the term for an understatement by way of a double negative is called a litotes. For example, rather than saying that someone is merely moderately smart, you can say that he is “not unintelligent.” In this way, the double negative can be employed to make a back-handed compliment.

Litotes can also be employed to create an impressionistic (and sometimes dramatic) meaning. For example, consider this lyric snippet by Neal Peart: “Life is not unpleasant in their little neighborhood.” Although life is not unpleasant here, it certainly is not pleasant. This clever double negative (“not” and the prefix “un”) swells with nuance. It is a sad declaration, isn’t it? These people do not have pleasant lives, but they don’t complain--they carry on between the pleasant and the unpleasant poles of the human condition, stuck in the middle. This sentence exemplifies the “exclusionary principle” of litotes, wherein the negated term (“unpleasant”) and its opposite are excluded from possibility by a well-crafted double negative. The reality is somewhere between the two terms, which is why a litotes can be employed to indirectly (and safely) characterize something as mediocre. In this case, “pleasant” is indirectly excluded from the lives of the denizens of Middletown.

Final Words on Double Negatives

Eschew the double negative, but do it for the proper reason. Not because it magically transforms a really negative sentence into a positive, but because it has a lot of linguistic baggage. Alas, the common types of double negatives are inexorably associated with lower learning and malformed language skills, and there are few exceptions (Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee). Using a double negative as an understatement (litotes) may go over the head of the reader or even be interpreted as petty instead of clever. However, if you are certain that your audience is literary, such a figure of speech may be just the thing to satisfy them.

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