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The Associated Press Stylebook 2015 This new edition contains more than 3,000 A to Z entries detailing the AP’s rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation, and word and numeral usage. Learn more
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The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker
The Sense of Style is a scholarly and witty book on the art of writing well. Bestselling author, linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker provides readers with a new writing-guide for the twenty-first century. He breaks down grammar rules and challenges purists on the best use of language. This challenging 368-page book includes the following six chapters: 1. Good Writing, 2. A Window onto the World, 3. The Curse of Knowledge, 4. The Web, the Tree, and the String, 5. Arcs of Coherence, and 6. Telling Right from Wrong.
Positives: 1. Dr. Pinker consistently produces quality work. 2. A "very" unique topic, the art of writing well from a scientific perspective. You don't have to read the book to get my joke. 3. Good use of wit that adds panache to a book about writing style. 4. Good advice throughout the book. "By replacing dogma about usage with reason and evidence, I hope not just to avoid giving ham-fisted advice but to make the advice that I do give easier to remember than a list of dos and don'ts." 5. Explains the three main reasons why style matters. 6. Provides insights on how to become a good writer. "Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose." 7. Supports good style over writing dogma. "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." "The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity.Read more ›
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Steven Pinker’s <I>The Sense of Style</I> fits into the tradition of style guides that began with Fowler and continues up through Bryan Garner. It will inevitably be compared with Willard Stunk and E. B. White’s <I>Elements of Style</I>, that sputnik-era Seussification of grammar and style. But the real comparison is with Joseph Williams’s excellent, but somewhat dated, book <I>Style: Towards Clarity and Grace</I>, one of the first works to blend linguistics and style. Pinker adopts and updates some of Williams’s insights (with all due acknowledgment of course) and connect them even more closely to current research in psycholinguistics and grammar.
Chapters 1-3 warm the reader up, with Pinker’s characteristic charm and good humor. In Chapter 1, “Good Writing,” Pinker reverse engineers (as he puts it) several examples of clear exposition, showing the value of simply thinking through what works in writing—strong starts, fresh idioms and diction, occasional playfulness, use of rhythm and meter, attention to the reader’s vantage point.
Chapter 2, “A Window on the World,” bring in the work of Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner (in their book <I>Clear and Simple as the Truth</I>) which defines “the classic style.” That is the style which draws its strength from the writer’s helping the reader see the world in a new way. Strong writers show the informed reader with narrative, explanation and examples that meet the readers where they are. That is opposed of course to the academic (and especially post-modern style) and Pinker finds no dearth of examples to illustrate the difference.Read more ›
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20 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Steven Pinker, renowned linguist and cognitive scientist, has written a book that is sure to disturb grammar mavens and delight thoughtful writers. In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Pinker advocates a common sense approach to the art of writing based on his years as a reader, writer, and professor, an approach that he refers to as the classic style. This style strives to communicate clearly and coherently and to establish a conversation between the writer and reader. Pinker also admonishes those who act as language police without truly understanding the way the English language works or the way the human mind processes language. These self-appointed guardians of language purity instead repeat what they learned (and probably misunderstood) in high school English class, without even bothering to consult a dictionary for current definitions and conventional usage. Nevertheless Pinker does not advocate a no-rules approach. In fact he believes that understanding the grammatical underpinnings of our language is essential to the development of good style.
Perhaps what impressed me the most about The Sense of Style is that the author never dumbs down his explanations or his examples. In fact, he trusts that his reader is intelligent enough to understand some rather technical grammatical jargon. For example, in one chapter Pinker examines the subtle but important differences between a modifier, an adjective, and a determiner based on their function in a sentence, rather than on their category in traditional grammar. And surprisingly he makes such in-depth examination not only clear but also relevant to those readers, like me, who dislike grammar but love writing.Read more ›
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This item: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
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