ID 36641551 @ Mohammed Anwarul Kabir Choudhury | Dreamstime.com
“She’s not not wrong.”
I stare at the sentence in the middle of my edit. A double-negative – kill, burn with fire!!!
Except…it’s in dialog. Rules are different there. They need to match the character and how they talk. Also, well, the scene, … the woman isn’t right, but she’s also not wrong. Can she be only “She’s not wrong.”? Or is the impact of the double negative “not not” needed to get the shade of meaning just right?
How does that work? How does the mind twist the meaning between halves of negative? Or is it three negatives? Is “wrong” a negative?
If double negatives are so frowned on, why does each generation use them? Other things have worked their way out of our language, but double-negatives refuse to die.
A 2024 study might give some insight to the problem. They are studying negation for AI programming purposes. AI hates negations because, even with the simpler “She’s not wrong”, it isn’t an absolute but this shade of gray depending on the people involved, what is happening, and the present cultural circumstances. “She’s not wrong.” isn’t “She’s right.” and, at this time, AI programming cannot handle it. Running into a negative makes the large-model language-processing computer flip everything to the opposite meaning, and that is NOT the case. (Devitt)
What happens, scientists have discovered is “not” mitigates the adjective. “Not hot” doesn’t mean cold, but, depending on the circumstance, meanings vary anywhere from “it won’t catch on fire” to “it won’t burn your tongue” to “room temperature.” Basically, “not” is letting you know that the normal things a HOT version of “this” (whatever “this” is) is not what will happen with this object. The firewood isn’t going to reignite, the pizza isn’t napalm on your tongue, and the coffee might need a run through the microwave before you drink it.
The test monitored reaction time to words on a screen as well as brain function. Negations slowed things down, forcing further engagement from the reader. The connections had to be processed and weighed to consider how “not” is the “not.” And while they didn’t cover double negatives, I bet these logical nightmares force even further engagement.
How does this apply to writing and editing?
Well, while we want the reader engaged with the reading, we don’t want them to work for understanding. Clarity is the ruler of the fiction world, and double-negatives (and it looks like normal negatives as well) decrease clarity. Shades of meaning: nearly, only, almost – add tension to the storytelling. “Not” adds tension as well. But too much uncertainty releases tension; the story just isn’t almost there.
For the publication community, the recommendation would be sharpen clarity and certainty in the narrative. The narrator voice should be trustworthy and easy to understand. The reader should breeze through the narrator voice, not stumbling on words and cutting shades of double-negatives to figure if the not-not-wrong is dark, light, or medium gray.
Dialog, though, can slow things down. Usually a dialog page has less words, but more character reveal. The words on the page are both part of the forward motion of the plot and the character development. Shades of gray, figuring what the character knows by what they are saying and what they are hiding and what they are misdirecting.
Negation should be in every writer’s toolbox, and every editor should hone the tool for best use within storytelling.
Who would have thought Negation is where “philosophers, psychologists, logicians, and linguists” (Zuanazzi) overlap with writers, editors, and readers?
Bibliography
Devitt, James. “How does the word ‘not’ affect your understanding of phrases.” Futurity.org. 2024 June 3. https://www.futurity.org/negation-language-interpretation-brains-3226342-2/ – last viewed 10/13/2025.
Zuanazzi, Arianna, et.al. “Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representation of adjectives.” PLOS Biology. 2024 May 30. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002622 – last viewed 10/13/2025