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The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Hardcover – 4 Sep 2014

4.2 out of 5 stars 78 customer reviews

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Allen Lane; Reprint edition (4 Sept. 2014)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1846145503
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846145506
  • Product Dimensions: 16.2 x 3.3 x 24 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 183,772 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century might be regarded as an update of Fowler, eschewing pedantry, convoluted or pompous sentence construction, cliché, and inflexible grammatical rules. Pinker is every bit as witty as Fowler, and writes in a similarly vigorous, direct and idiosyncratic manner. His book is accordingly much less boring than one might expect of a style manual. Indeed, it is often laugh-out-loud funny... Pinker knows that simplicity is more difficult to perfect than abstruse convolution. It helps enormously that he is such a beautiful stylist himself. Many of his sentences give great pleasure and he is never lofty or pleased with himself (Paula Byrne The Times)

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

An award-winning cognitive scientist and public intellectual, 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: Language as a Window into Human Nature. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and lives in Boston & Truro, Massachusetts.


Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By Hande Z TOP 500 REVIEWER on 17 Oct. 2014
Format: Hardcover
If you feel that you need an up-to-date version of 'The Complete Plain Words' (by Ernest Gowers), or have enjoyed 'The Elements of Style' (by White & Strunk) so much that you wish that there is a longer version of it, then Pinker's 'The Sense of Style' is what you are looking for. Chapter Four: `The Web, the Tree, and the String' may be the most important and useful chapter in this book because it teaches syntax, without which grammar becomes a wild horse. This chapter is technical and needs careful reading. My favourite chapter is chapter 6: `Telling Right from Wrong'. In this chapter Pinker takes a swipe at purists and pedants for misleading the reader and writer - 'in their zeal to purify usage and safeguard the language, they have made it difficult to think clearly about felicity in expression and have muddied the task of explaining the art of writing.' Chapter 6 is probably the essence of this book.
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Format: Paperback
I wonder if any bunch of Amazon reviews has ever been written with such a level of collective anxiety? :-)

I can't add much to what's been said. In a nutshell, this book is good, and well worth reading.

Most of the many books I've picked up on the subject of style have been put down again pretty quickly. Not because they are all bad (though some are) but because they don't seem to add much to what I originally learnt in the venerable classics -- Strunk & White; Fowler's Modern English Usage; Sir Ernest Gowers et al.

Pinker's book is one that I've stuck with to the end, and it was worth it. The topics are mostly the same as ever, but his voice seems fresh and authoritative. He's made me rethink a number of things I've lazily taken for granted over the decades. I now realise that knee-jerk pedantry is not a good thing. I always suspected it, but carried on regardless. I know better now.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Review courtesy of www.subtleillumination.com

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.
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Format: Hardcover
This book goes far beyond any other style guide I've read in describing what distinguishes good writing from bad, and is a pleasure to read. The negative reviews on this page reveal more about their authors than about this book.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This is a provocative, well written book. I got a lot out of it, partly because it is humorous as well as seemingly well-informed (I only say "seemingly" because I use my native language with great pain).

One of the few books I take to bed.

I have found two chapters particularly useful: 4 on syntax (previously a closed door to me, having been educated in the 1970s) and 6 on pedants. (seems razor sharp; certainly funny).

A previous reviewer (Chris ap Alfred "Gofalus") thought that Stephen Jay Gould would have been a less controversial choice as a science writer than Richard Dawkins. Two points: first, Gould is greatly missed, but was hardly uncontroversial; second, you might disagree with Dawkins, but he can write! On the last point, I can admire the exquisite language of parts of the King James Bible without agreeing with the views that the original authors expressed.
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Format: Hardcover
This book is a joy. It deploys an impressive armoury of weapons – common sense, wisdom, in-depth understanding of modern linguistics and the fruits of neuro-linguistic research – to battle the Grammar Nazis. It outlines an approach to writing style that promotes directness and clarity over the accumulated cruft of arcane “rules” dictated by the self-appointed guardians of our sacred language.

It acknowledges the importance of changing usage (measured empirically) in modifying the rules we use to write but it doesn’t advocate a relativistic free-for-all. By carefully delineating the different styles of writing that we use, from the loose and informal texts and emails to the careful and precise meanings of formal and academic writing, Pinker is able to judge the benefits of changing practice in the appropriate written context. He is doing this all the time from the point of view of clarity and precision rather than status and snobbery, for which he has no patience. Thus he is careful to advocate the preservation of many of the devices, including the apostrophe, that contribute to clear writing but are under threat today.

If there is a criticism it is that too much is left to the writer to decide on aesthetic grounds – the outcome thus depends on the quality of the author’s ear for language. But to write is to make judgements all the time and we are attracted to authors who make what seem to us the right decisions.

For anyone who takes writing seriously this is, in my opinion, a must-read work.
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