''The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century'' is a 2014 English
style guide
A style guide or manual of style is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. It is often called a style sheet, although that term also has multiple other meanings. The standards can be applied either for gene ...
written by cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
P ...
. Building upon earlier guides, such as
Strunk &
White
White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White on ...
's ''
The Elements of Style
''The Elements of Style'' is an American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary p ...
'' and
Fowler's ''
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
''A Dictionary of Modern English Usage'' (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words ...
'', 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
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
'', the usage notes of several dictionaries and style guides, the historical analyses in ''
Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
''Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage'' is a usage dictionary published by Merriam-Webster, Inc., of Springfield, Massachusetts . It is currently available in a reprint edition (1994) or . (The 1989 edition did not include ''Merriam-'' ...
'', 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
''The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language'' (''CGEL'') is a descriptive grammar of the English language. Its primary authors are Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Huddleston was the only author to work on every chapter. It was publ ...
'' and the blog
Language Log
''Language Log'' is a collaborative language blog maintained by Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania.
Most of the posts focus on language use in the media and in popular culture. Text available through Google Search fr ...
.
Contents
Prologue
"Style" is the effective use of words to engage the human mind. Style manuals that are innocent of linguistics are crippled in dealing with the aspect of writing that evokes the most emotion: correct and incorrect usage. Orthodox stylebooks are ill-equipped to deal with a fundamental fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather an evolving set of tacit standards from the contributions of millions of writers and speakers.
Good writing
''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.
A window onto the world
''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".
The curse of knowledge
The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the
curse of knowledge
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with other individuals, assumes that the other individuals have the background knowledge to understand. This bias is also called by some authors the c ...
– the difficulty of imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. Be aware of specific pitfalls that it sets in your path, e.g., the use of jargon, abbreviations, and technical vocabulary. Show a draft to some people who are similar to your intended audience, and find out whether they can follow it. Show a draft to yourself, after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. Rework and revise.
The web, the tree, and the string
''Understanding syntax can help a writer avoid ungrammatical, convoluted, and misleading prose'' – Learning how to bring the units of language into consciousness can allow writers to reason their way to grammatically consistent sentences, and to diagnose problems. Grammar is a fascinating subject in its own right, when it is properly explained.
Arcs of coherence
''How to ensure that readers will grasp the topic, get the point, keep track of the players, and see how one idea follows from another'' – Even if every sentence in a text is crisp, lucid, and well formed, a succession of them can feel choppy, disjointed, unfocused, incoherent. A coherent text is a designed object: an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connectors that tie one proposition to the next. Like other designed objects, it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details, and maintaining a sense of harmony and balance.
Telling right from wrong
''How to make sense of the rules of correct grammar, word choice, and punctuation'' – The idea that there are exactly two approaches to usage – all the traditional rules must be followed, or else anything goes – is a myth. The first step in mastering usage is to understand why the myth is wrong. There is no such thing as a "language war" between
prescriptivists and
descriptivists. "The alleged controversy is as bogus as other catchy dichotomies such as ''nature versus nurture'' and ''America: Love It or Leave It''." The key is to recognize that the rules of usage are ''tacit conventions''. A convention is an agreement among the members of a community to abide by a single way of doing things. Linguists capture their regularities in "descriptive rules" – that is, rules that describe how people speak and understand. A subset of these conventions is less widespread and natural, but has become accepted by a smaller community of literate speakers for use in public forums such as government, journalism, literature, business, and academia. These conventions are "prescriptive rules" – rules that prescribe how one ought to speak and write in these forums. Unlike the descriptive rules, many of the prescriptive rules have to be stated explicitly, because they are not second nature to most writers: the rules may not apply in the spoken vernacular, or they may be difficult to implement in complicated sentences which tax the writer's memory. This raises the question of how a careful writer can distinguish a legitimate rule of usage from a tall tale. The answer: look it up. Pinker includes a short guide to a hundred of the most commonly raised issues of grammar, word usage, and punctuation. (For Pinker's Top 10 list, see .)
Reception
''The Sense of Style'' won
Plain English Campaign
The Plain English Campaign (PEC) is a commercial editing and training firm based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1979 by Chrissie Maher, the company is a world leader in plain-language advocacy, working to persuade organisations in the UK and ...
's International Award for 2014, and was ranked among the best books of 2014 by ''
The Economist
''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Econo ...
'', ''
The Sunday Times
''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, whi ...
'', and
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...
. It received mainly positive reviews from several major publications, including ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', ''
Scientific American
''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...
'', and ''
The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'', and a negative review from ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
''. ''
The Telegraph
''The Telegraph'', ''Daily Telegraph'', ''Sunday Telegraph'' and other variant names are popular names for newspapers. Newspapers with these titles include:
Australia
* ''The Telegraph'' (Adelaide), a newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, publ ...
'' states Pinker "doesn't have anything new to say" and criticizes Pinker for allegedly "
logrolling
Logrolling is the trading of favors, or ''quid pro quo'', such as vote trading by legislative members to obtain passage of actions of interest to each legislative member. In organizational analysis, it refers to a practice in which different o ...
" in his choice of which authors to quote.
References
External links
''The Sense of Style'' on stevenpinker.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sense of Style
Works by Steven Pinker
Style guides for American English
Style guides for British English
Grammar books
2014 non-fiction books
Penguin Books books