The Sense of Style

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

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Steven Pinker: The Sense of Style (2015, Penguin Books)

paperback, 368 pages

Published Sept. 22, 2015 by Penguin Books.

ISBN:
978-0-14-312779-6
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4 stars (1 review)

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.