New Writing Guide: The Sense of Style

On writing well...

 

Snoopy, still using a typewriter

 

 

Writing is something all of us do from time to time.

 

To try to write well, we often rely on lessons from the past, including those from style guides.

 

Steven Pinker, a popular Harvard lecturer, has written a new guide, which Charles McGrath had some fun reviewing yesterday in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

 

McGrath wrote, "...Pinker, the Harvard linguist and psychologist, is one of that new breed of top-flight scientists and teachers, like the physicist Brian Greene and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who also write uncommonly well."

 

He added, "To those of us who try to write for a living and couldn’t pass a science course, let alone teach one, such people are a little annoying. 

"And now, not content with just poaching, Pinker has set himself up as a gamekeeper of sorts; he’s bringing out a manual, telling the rest of us how writing ought to be done."

 

The title, “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,” suggests it’s even meant to supplant that classic text “The Elements of Style,” by Will Strunk and E. B. White, according to McGrath.

 

For more on McGrath's entertaining and thoughtful review:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/steven-pinker-the-sense-of-style-review.html?ref=books&_r=0