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E**A
A style guide by someone who cares
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.In Chapter 3, “The Curse of Knowledge,” Pinker explains the problem of specialists who are unable to see the world as their readers see it and thus over-complicate their prose with jargon, nominalizations, abbreviations, unexplained assumptions, and other insider shortcuts.Chapter 4 “The Web, The Tree, and the String” is a long chapter (really, it’s pages 76-138) on syntax. Pinker’s basic point here is that syntax is our tool for putting organization to thought and, moreover, that thinking about sentences as structured entities (modelled by tree diagrams) rather than simple flat strings of words can give us a richer outlook on many problems of style. It’s a fine chapter for linguists, but general readers may struggle a bit here. As more than one readers has noted, here Pinker himself seems to fall victim to the curse of knowledge.Chapter 5 “Arcs of Coherence” is another long chapter (pages 139-186) in which Pinker shows how writers build (or don’t build) coherence in sentences and paragraphs. Coherence involves carefully attending to the reader’s knowledge and to the pattern a writer develops through parallelism, consistency of diction, integration new ideas into ones just introduced, and continual focus on the point of the prose.Chapter 6, “Telling Right from Wrong,” is not so much a chapter as a separate style guide making up about a third of the book. Here Pinker gleefully takes on many the traditional rules and folk rules of English grammar, separating them into broad categories of grammar; quantity, quality and degree; diction; and punctuation. He explains, refines or corrects the traditional takes on grammar, doing so in a way will warm the heart of anyway who has ever been scolded by an ignoramus and capture the interest of the open-minded. Don’t skip the style guide; it’s got some gems on <I>fewer</I> vs. <I>less</i>, restrictive and non-restrictive, fused participles, and the use of commas.<I>The Sense of Style</I> has a few flaws (the curse of knowledge, for one) and it might have been shorter in chapters 4 and 5. But overall it is a fine book, well written and well thought out, by someone who not only cares about language but cares about the facts.
P**Z
An Analytic Masterpice as Much for Readers as Writers
Rabid fans of Pinker (like me) will NOT be disappointed with this book! It would be a mistake to assume all the Strunk and White, Elements of Style stuff promoted by the publisher in some way limits this gem of a book to writers and writing. What we love about Pinker: -- assuming his readers are bright -- covering potentially "boring" topics like linguistics as they relate to cognition in can't-put-it-down fashion -- getting into the underlying mechanics of and with deep analysis, logic and example dissection, (among many others) are all here in abundance.Like his other books, this wonderful text is a page turner. His usual sense of both humility and astonishment both abound. How can a topic as potentially dry as writing style carry that kind of tide? Many answers, but one is the quality of examples. In typical Pinker style, Steven gives an example (for instance, one of my favorites, Keegan and Clausewitz on war, p. 170), initially goes along with the abundant praise of style and logic, then in his typical brilliant yet childlike fashion, says, "Wait a minute?" and dissects the logic with the honed scalpel we're used to seeing in his neuro and linguistics masterpieces. And how nontrivial (given the news) is a topic like why humans go to war? My point is that far beyond being for seasoned or budding writers, this wonderful text is equally for fans of his other investigations of human logic and choice, as well as a general touchstone for all readers in analytically evaluating what they are reading.I'm not saying that the audience for this work isn't writers, but if you sat as an observer in a brilliant writing class given by not just a brilliant writer and author, but also linguist and cognitive scientist, you'd be taking copious notes on the astonishing depth and subtlety of cognitive errors that truly refined analysis produces. Some of the life changing twists and turns in interpretation and style read more like a detective story than a how to manual. But of course-- lead by example-- all the knowledge on the planet won't keep you reading if the author isn't fun, delicious, and adept at keeping readers continuously engaged, even with deep topics and analysis.And there's the rub. It's tough enough to write a good novel, but how do you write about, say, science, in an engaging way? This isn't a Monday morning analyst, or a bleachers expert, it is a recursive, here's what it's about, how it's done, and oh, by the way, you're IN it right now author. Frankly, I do analysis at the code level in programming and bio/ robotics and am far from a language expert (but do see its reflection in category theory, for example), so I have to "study" rather than read Pinker's books. How does he manage to "lead me along" with a page turner style, even though I keep stopping to re-read and look up his concepts? Not exactly sure, but am a little closer to the answer now. Highly recommended!
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