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

Steven Pinker’s <I>The Sense of Style</I> fits into the tradition of style guides that began with Fowler and continues up through Bryan Garner. It will inevitably be compared with Willard Stunk and E. B. White’s <I>Elements of Style</I>, that sputnik-era Seussification of grammar and style. But the real comparison is with Joseph Williams’s excellent, but somewhat dated, book <I>Style: Towards Clarity and Grace</I>, one of the first works to blend linguistics and style. Pinker adopts and updates some of Williams’s insights (with all due acknowledgment of course) and connect them even more closely to current research in psycholinguistics and grammar.Chapters 1-3 warm the reader up, with Pinker’s characteristic charm and good humor. In Chapter 1, “Good Writing,” Pinker reverse engineers (as he puts it) several examples of clear exposition, showing the value of simply thinking through what works in writing—strong starts, fresh idioms and diction, occasional playfulness, use of rhythm and meter, attention to the reader’s vantage point.Chapter 2, “A Window on the World,” bring in the work of Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner (in their book <I>Clear and Simple as the Truth</I>) which defines “the classic style.” That is the style which draws its strength from the writer’s helping the reader see the world in a new way. Strong writers show the informed reader with narrative, explanation and examples that meet the readers where they are. That is opposed of course to the academic (and especially post-modern style) and Pinker finds no dearth of examples to illustrate the difference.In Chapter 3, “The Curse of Knowledge,” Pinker explains the problem of specialists who are unable to see the world as their readers see it and thus over-complicate their prose with jargon, nominalizations, abbreviations, unexplained assumptions, and other insider shortcuts.Chapter 4 “The Web, The Tree, and the String” is a long chapter (really, it’s pages 76-138) on syntax. Pinker’s basic point here is that syntax is our tool for putting organization to thought and, moreover, that thinking about sentences as structured entities (modelled by tree diagrams) rather than simple flat strings of words can give us a richer outlook on many problems of style. It’s a fine chapter for linguists, but general readers may struggle a bit here. As more than one readers has noted, here Pinker himself seems to fall victim to the curse of knowledge.Chapter 5 “Arcs of Coherence” is another long chapter (pages 139-186) in which Pinker shows how writers build (or don’t build) coherence in sentences and paragraphs. Coherence involves carefully attending to the reader’s knowledge and to the pattern a writer develops through parallelism, consistency of diction, integration new ideas into ones just introduced, and continual focus on the point of the prose.Chapter 6, “Telling Right from Wrong,” is not so much a chapter as a separate style guide making up about a third of the book. Here Pinker gleefully takes on many the traditional rules and folk rules of English grammar, separating them into broad categories of grammar; quantity, quality and degree; diction; and punctuation. He explains, refines or corrects the traditional takes on grammar, doing so in a way will warm the heart of anyway who has ever been scolded by an ignoramus and capture the interest of the open-minded. Don’t skip the style guide; it’s got some gems on <I>fewer</I> vs. <I>less</i>, restrictive and non-restrictive, fused participles, and the use of commas.<I>The Sense of Style</I> has a few flaws (the curse of knowledge, for one) and it might have been shorter in chapters 4 and 5. But overall it is a fine book, well written and well thought out, by someone who not only cares about language but cares about the facts.

How refreshing to read a style book that operates on actual style rather than a preconceived list of must-haves. Pinker uses the logic of expression, an historical view of changes in language, and an ACTUAL definition of style to offer up a thoughtful book that presents and exemplifies clear, simple and accurate expression. Also marvelous for its humor, using cartoons as well as references to The Princess Bride, Spinal Tap and Monty Python as suitable examples. While not quite a sit-down-and-read primer, going back over passages I'd underlined was just as worthwhile.Just check out this explanation of classic style, the idea he orients his presentation around:"The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader's gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it: prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader's gaze takes the form of a conversation."He later defines disinterested properly as unbiased and without a vested interest. He also nicely qualifies that such presentation does require drafting and revision, likening this to a celebrity chef pulling a soufflé from the oven--we are presented with the final product and not the whole process of him learning how to make it.I have always been troubled at the idea of expecting students to write 'with style,' for I'd always the phrase ambiguous and thus unquantifiable and unattainable. But Pinker, as he does throughout the book, takes ambiguities and presents them in clear, attainable terms.And so reassuring. For example, hearing him describe paragraph breaks as eye rests for the reader, grammar and punctuation as guides to reading rather than persnickety rules, and even his own moments of persnicketiness for accuracy, that makes this a book to keep on-hand in defense against the lazy and hyper-arrogant.