Rating:

The Seventh Sense?

Author:  Steven Pinker

Sense of style cover 2 (183x276)I’ve been putting words on paper for more than forty years.  You’d think I’d have figured it out by now.  But as Steven Pinker points out in The Sense of Style, there’s nothing particularly natural about writing.  While a toddler can learn to speak coherently without much effort, articulate writing takes many years of practice and a lot of hard work.  Even then, the results can be less than satisfactory.  Deftly untangling and explaining the numerous challenges faced by authors of various kinds, Pinker, a Harvard psychology and linguistics professor, has compiled a useful and up-to-date guide for anyone who wants to improve their dexterity with prose.

Displaying much clarity and wit, Pinker starts by analyzing specific pieces of effective writing.  He then explores why well-meaning authors often fail – even when they are unequivocally talented and knowledgeable people.  Moving on from these larger concepts, he then goes on to explore sentence construction and paragraph assembly, finishing with a lengthy section on punctuation and other pitfalls.

Full of interesting history and data, the book is much more than a dry, boring usage guide.  Basing his opinions on extensive research into how readers understand what they’re reading, as well as the usage patterns by great writers all the way back to Shakespeare, Pinker provides a thoughtful rationale for all of his recommendations.  He also relies on opinions collected from the members of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, which he chairs.

Consistently valuing logic over tradition, the author debunks numerous grammatical myths, discusses how to use commas effectively and confidently and even persuasively justifies the occasional use of phrases like “very unique”.  Providing useful samples of great writing as well as numerous mistakes by great writers, Pinker stresses that the goal in critiquing your own or someone else’s writing is to convey information effectively, not to mindlessly follow the rules.  To this end, he encourages compassion and humility towards one’s fellow writers, emotions that are often lacking in the curmudgeonly world of the internet grammar police.  Surprisingly, given his ivory tower credentials, Pinker is quite open to allowing language to continue to evolve, as it has done since its inception.

In the end, Pinker successfully contends that the most important reason to write carefully is to create the impression of competence.  If you know the rules of writing, you have probably done your homework in other areas as well.  If you avoid manhandling the language with misspellings, malapropisms and inappropriate apostrophes, you demonstrate to the reader that you care about your work, which implies that you also care about your thoughts and arguments.

Whether you’re writing air conditioner maintenance manuals or zombie novels, The Sense of Style can help you be more effective with the written word.  I think it’s fair to say that even the most accomplished writers can find ways to improve their skills and this book provides plenty of helpful and effective ways to do so. While it’s primarily directed at writers, I can also recommend it for any readers who want to learn more about the many curious wrinkles in the ever changing English language.  Whatever your pet peeve may be – from dangling participles, to apostrophe catastrophes, to the use of “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun – Pinker provides an abundance of practical and thoughtful discussion, advice and guidance for writers of any stripe.

— D. Driftless

[AMAZONPRODUCTS asin=”0670025852″]
dave
Latest posts by dave (see all)