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The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Hardcover – 4 Sept. 2014
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Steven Pinker, the bestselling author of The Language Instinct, deploys his gift for explaining big ideas in The Sense of Style - an entertaining writing guide for the 21st century
What is the secret of good prose? Does writing well even matter in an age of instant communication? Should we care? In this funny, thoughtful book about the modern art of writing, Steven Pinker shows us why we all need a sense of style.
More than ever before, the currency of our social and cultural lives is the written word, from Twitter and texting to blogs, e-readers and old-fashioned books. But most style guides fail to prepare people for the challenges of writing in the 21st century, portraying it as a minefield of grievous errors rather than a form of pleasurable mastery. They fail to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time, adapted by millions of writers and speakers to their needs. Confusing changes in the world with moral decline, every generation believes the kids today are degrading society and taking language with it. A guide for the new millennium, writes Steven Pinker, has to be different.
Drawing on the latest research in linguistics and cognitive science, Steven Pinker replaces the recycled dogma of previous style guides with reason and evidence. This thinking person's guide to good writing shows why style still matters: in communicating effectively, in enhancing the spread of ideas, in earning a reader's trust and, not least, in adding beauty to the world. Eye-opening, mind-expanding and cheerful, The Sense of Style shows that good style is part of what it means to be human.
An award-winning cognitive scientist, Steven Pinker is also Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and the lauded author of bestsellers such as The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Stuff of Thought. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and lives in Boston & Truro, MA.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAllen Lane
- Publication date4 Sept. 2014
- Dimensions16.2 x 3.3 x 24 cm
- ISBN-101846145503
- ISBN-13978-1846145506
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Review
Gentle humour accompanies Mr Pinker's good sense throughout the book, an antidote to bestselling, operatically irate usage guides that disparage those who disagree as idiots or barbarians. Mr Pinker explains eloquently not just what to do, but also why (Economist)
An outstanding source of wise advice (Times Oliver Kamm)
A thoughtful guide, tough-minded and up to date, for people who think they can write well but are willing to believe that they could write better (Henry Hitchings Guardian)
A canny and punchy polemic (Stevie Davies Independent)
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Allen Lane; Reprint edition (4 Sept. 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1846145503
- ISBN-13 : 978-1846145506
- Dimensions : 16.2 x 3.3 x 24 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 22,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 8 in Language References
- 9 in Linguistic Morphology
- 25 in Editing Reference
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Steven Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind. His popular and highly praised books include The Stuff of Thought, The Blank Slate, Words and Rules, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct. The recipient of several major awards for his teaching, books, and scientific research, Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He also writes frequently for The New York Times, Time, The New Republic, and other magazines.
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Well, this is not your granddad’s style guide, not by a long shot. If you’ve read, say, The Elements of Style, you ought to read The Sense of Style to get contemporary insight into what makes for good writing. But how much you like this book, and find it helpful, will depend on where you’re at on your writing journey. If you’re producing decent stuff and have an idea of how language works and, perhaps, like me, some knowledge about linguistics, the book might confirm what you know more than change the way you think about writing. However, if you’re looking for guidance this book is an excellent choice.
I learned three or four extremely valuable things, five or six slightly less valuable things, and entertained and contemplated a host of other suggestions and ideas. I liked the book’s own style (it’s well written), most of the selected examples of exceptional and horrible writing, the cartoons, the counterattack as it were on grammar Nazis, and many other aspects. However, I was nearly bored to tears by Chapter 4, The Web, the Tree, and the String. I find tree charts soporific and don’t think analyzing language in such terms (preposition/noun phrase/noun phrase/verb phrase) is helpful. However, if you prefer psycholinguistics over sociolinguistics, you might revel in this section. I would also have liked to see a more modern or balanced view on the nature of language, i.e. language as a conveyor of ideology and language as power. That Pinker doesn’t conceptualize language this way is unfortunate. It’s helped create a book that is eminently erudite yet somewhat conservative. I suppose that you cannot be all things to all people, but Mr. Pinker is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. If I were in that position, I wouldn’t be so cautious.
Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World
Steven Pinker “writes like an angel.” – The Economist
Cotton clothing is made from is grown in Egypt. Did that sentence make sense to you? Probably not. It’s what’s called a garden path: a sentence that lures the reader into interpreting a phrase in one sense (in this case, cotton clothing), when in truth it is meant in another, a fact that is made clear only at the end of the sentence. They are, unsurprisingly, a good thing to avoid in good writing.
The Sense of Style is not really a prescriptive, ‘this is how to rite good,’ sort of guide, though some sections do give concrete guidelines. Instead, it is a study of what it is to write well; an effort to understand the basic principles that can illuminate and expose ideas in text.
The answer, Pinker argues, is to write in classic style; to write as if you were in conversation with the reader, directing their gaze to something in the world. Good writers ensure their readers don’t have to keep a lot of information in their memory as they read, share their drafts with others and read aloud while editing, and above all attempt to write clearly and coherently, presenting ideas in an order designed to make them clear to the reader, not in which they occurred to the author.
The book is good reading for anyone who spends their time writing, whether in academia, journalism, business, or anywhere else. Since I finished, I’ve found myself rereading many of my own sentences over with Steven Pinker’s principles in mind, and if my writing isn’t quite up to his standard yet, it’s improving.
A final comment: writing well is in many ways about thinking well, and in his parting comments Pinker gives advice that applies to both. Good writers, he suggests, look things up; make sure arguments are sound; don’t confuse a personal experience with the state of the world; avoid false dichotomies; and base arguments on reasons, not people. If you never write another word in your life, it’s still good advice.
The first couple of chapters are superb and much more the sort of thing I was expecting: Professor Pinker gives us examples of writers’ prose and explains to us what makes them so good. The remainder – and bulk - of the book is an examination of grammar, usage and punctuation. One chapter, featuring tree diagrams of sentence structure, is exceedingly complicated and, it must be said, extremely boring. Personally, I would have liked to have heard more about prosody, defined by the author in his excellent glossary as “the melody, timing, and rhythm of speech”. (Not keen on that Oxford comma myself.)
Fortunately, Steven Pinker is a very entertaining writer; he throws in jokes and witty asides and some very funny cartoons. It is certainly unusual to find Yiddishisms in a guide to writing better English! He is pleasingly relaxed about the rules too; above all, writers should make themselves clear to their readers. If a sentence has to be read through a second time, it hasn’t worked. All in all, I would say this is a worthwhile addition to the reference bookshelf….though the professor has made me more nervous about my writing rather than more confident. I’m pretty sure this was not his intention!
It is well researched and offers many examples and it is up to date: can you use "they" to avoid sexist language and can you use "they" in singular? Purists will frown and object and state that by writing 'he' it should be enough but a sentence such as "Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for over four minutes?" shows this does not work.
This book explores language and assists me on my journey to improve and learn. I highly recommend it.






