the thinking person's guide to writing in the 21st century

White, the beloved author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. Pinker of course dedicates a chapter to the authors of the classic Elements of Style, William Strunk and E. It may be self-contradictory in places, and Pinker may indeed have wandered off course here and there, but there is still much that's worthwhile. This book has been savaged by critics, and I took exception with parts of it, as well. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.I'm familiar with Steven Pinker's work in linguistics and cognition, so when I saw that he'd written a book on writing style, I pounced on it. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic.

He has also received seven honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature.

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.įilled 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. 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. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more.

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?

The thinking person's guide to writing in the 21st century