The Sense of Style
| Author | Steven Pinker |
|---|---|
| Country | United States of America |
| Language | English |
| Published | 2014 (Penguin Books) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 870919633 |
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century is a 2014 English style guide written by the cognitive scientist, linguist, and best-selling popular science author Steven Pinker. Building upon earlier guides, such as Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, it applies science to the process of writing, and explains its prescriptions by citing studies in related fields - e.g., grammatical phenomena, mental dynamics, and memory load - as well as history and criticism, to "distinguish the rules that enhance clarity, grace, and emotional resonance from those that are based on myths and misunderstandings".
Pinker's prescriptions combine data from ballots given to the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, the usage notes of several dictionaries and style guides, the historical analyses in Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, the meta-analysis in Roy Copperud’s American Usage and Style: The Consensus, and views from modern linguistics represented in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and the blog Language Log.
Reverse-engineering good prose as the key to developing a writerly ear - The starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader. Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks, and with them a sensitivity to how they mesh and how they clash. This is the elusive "ear" of a skilled writer - the tacit sense of style which cannot be explicitly taught.
Classic style as an antidote for academese, bureaucratese, corporatese, legalese, officialese, and other kinds of stuffy prose - The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate. A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging the reader in conversation. Classic style is an ideal. Not all prose should be classic, and not all writers can carry off the pretense. But knowing the hallmarks of classic style will make anyone a better writer, and it is "the strongest cure for the disease that enfeebles academic, bureaucratic, corporate, legal, and official prose".
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