The Sense of Style : : the Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21St Century

Locations
Call Number: 808.042 Pi, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Writing & Publishing / Pinker, Steven
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	808.042 Pi	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Writing & Publishing / Pinker, Steven	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Writing & Publishing / Pinker, Steven	4-week checkout	Due 05-16-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	808.042 Pi	4-week checkout	Due 05-01-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Writing & Publishing / Pinker, Steven	4-week checkout	Due 05-02-2024

Good writing -- A window onto the world -- The curse of knowledge -- The web, the tree, and the string -- Arcs of coherence -- Telling right from wrong.
" A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care? In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the 21st century, Pinker doesn't carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow,and an ability to savor and reverse-engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right"-- Provided by publisher.
"Pinker has a lot of ideas and sometimes controversial opinions about writing and in this entertaining and instructive book he rethinks the usage guide for the 21st century. Don't blame the internet, he says, good writing has always been hard. It requires imagination, taking pleasure in reading, overcoming the difficulty we all have in imagining what it's like to not know something we do know"-- Provided by publisher.

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Academic-speak submitted by SurfGrape on June 12, 2015, 9:29am THE SENSE OF STYLE is written in long paragraphs of academic-speak. However, the ideas are not complex enough to warrant convoluted sentences dripping with graduate-level vocabulary. But of course, it fulfills the twin purposes of jargon: to make the author’s points seem more important and to exclude the riffraff.

Studying linguistics doesn’t make Pinker an expert on style. He disagrees with language purists, but his imagined enemies are a vague “they.” Besides E.B. White, Pinker doesn’t bother to cite the authorities he disagrees with. He seems to be holding up straw men for the pleasure of shooting them down, all while presenting his own personal opinion as the objective authority. His big reveal is that language changes over time and that the rules of 1900 are not the rules of 2000, which isn’t a revelation to anyone except Pinker himself.