![]() The humour makes the medicine go down easily: The compulsion of writers to ‘call a spade successively a garden implement and an earth-turning tool’ is just silly.Īt the end of the book there’s a large section devoted to the technical problems you’ve always wondered about (which I found helpful). There’s good advice on sentence construction, grammar and punctuation, all of which is given in a conversational style with much humour. ‘Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.’ He’s not pushing for plain English (although that movement has done much good) but acknowledges the real need for clarity, grace, and coherence in our writing. As you’d expect, he acknowledges that linguistic changes are always happening, that the English-speaking world seems to have become less formal. And this is an informal yet rigorous writer’s guidebook in which he disarms both the grammatical pedant and the pretentious academic, and pleads for an easy ‘classic style’. Steven Pinker is a charming, wild-haired Psychology Professor at Harvard, a cognitive scientist with a passion for words. Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style (pic:)Ī quick review. ![]()
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