The Sense of Style

The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

hardcover, 359 pages

Published Sept. 30, 2014 by Viking.

ISBN:
978-0-670-02585-5
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4 stars (2 reviews)

A guide to writing English informed by recent scholarship (linguistics, cognative science, and such like).

4 editions

Good nuggets

4 stars

Steven Pinker can be insufferable at times, but I think I must grant that this book had a net positive effect on my writing. I appreciate it and do recommend others to read it once or twice. The examples of good writing are instructive if not only pleasurable to read. The counter-arguments to other writing style-guides and grammar police are very constructive.

This book is best consumed in written form. Sections that speak of sentences as trees are harder to visualize by description alone; consulting the accompanying PDF just isn't practical. The sections on punctuation were a bit of a hard listen as well.

Review of "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

At first, I confess, I wasn’t thrilled by it. It seemed ok, while a bit posh. But that, I think, happened, because I was not familiar with Pinker’s style. And truth is that his is a peculiar one: thoroughly backed by solid research, insightful examples and timely delivery.

In a guide about style for the 21st century thinker, Pinker shines as someone who not only has a masterful theoretical grasp of the subject at hand, but who is also a master of the craft itself. And thanks to this, the book is as easy to read as it is to understand.

The content, however, goes beyond what you would expect from such a guide. Pinker is not merely focused on the plethora of dos and donts of the writing craft, but on making you understand why this or that is preferable to some other alternative. And by doing so, …