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Loading... The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (original 2014; edition 2014)by Steven Pinker
Work InformationThe Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker (2014)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  mykl-s | Feb 19, 2024 |    ) ellink | Jan 22, 2024 |  ) Pishmoffle | Mar 27, 2023 | I listened to this, which might seem a bit strange for a book on writing style, but well worth it. Arthur Morey gives a excellent narration, intonating the bits of wry humor Pinker wrote perfectly. Grammar and style are well-mined fields only slightly less contentious than abortion, Palestine and US foreign policy. Pinker, though, had the right combination of bravery and audacity to tackle them. For my money, he did a great job. The advice is eminently practical - always backed up by solid reasons. Typically to benefit the reader: to make comprehension easier, to help the text flow better, to avoid ambiguity. At the end of the book is, if anywhere, were one may differ with Pinker. He evaluates various grammar and usage rules and opines on whether they should be followed or not. But, even in this section, he gives practical reasons and the opinion of a panel of usage experts. Sometimes the reasons are rooted in simply being coherent and avoiding confusion; sometimes a rule is on the silly side, but violating it will piss off so many and/or make them think you are either stupid or careless you should simply knuckle under and follow it regardless of how silly it may be. In the few instances where he descends to prescriptivism, he admits it. Pinker states that we needed a modern style guide to replace the aging standbys and I couldn't agree more. I can think of a couple style guides of recent vintage that cover the style and grammar in a similarly useful way, but none of them broke into the mainstream. Pinker's popular enough that hopefully The Sense of Style will. (  ) qaphsiel | Feb 20, 2023 | davdittrich | Feb 14, 2023 | no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctions
" A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care? In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the 21st century, Pinker doesn't carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow,and an ability to savor and reverse-engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right"--
"Pinker has a lot of ideas and sometimes controversial opinions about writing and in this entertaining and instructive book he rethinks the usage guide for the 21st century. Don't blame the internet, he says, good writing has always been hard. It requires imagination, taking pleasure in reading, overcoming the difficulty we all have in imagining what it's like to not know something we do know"-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresNo genres Melvil Decimal System (DDC)808.042Literature By Topic Rhetoric and anthologies Rhetoric and anthologies Handbooks for writers EnglishLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.86)
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Wikipedia in English (3)
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Pinker writes well and studies human thinking and language, so it's worth knowing what he believes good writing, mostly non-fiction writing, should look like. I'm not disappointed. He discusses the goal of describing a topic for a reader who is as smart as the author, but who doesn't know as much about the topic as the author does. "Clear" and "simple" are terms that come up often.
The index, twenty pages or more, is actually useful, as an index should be, but often isn't in a book like this, a book that will be a reference work and guide for writers and readers. The many examples of good and bad writing are usually clear and to the point and well explained.
This is a book I wish more writers owned and used. (