The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Steven Pinkeramazon.com
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Often the pronouns I, me, and you are not just harmless but downright helpful.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Academics, consultants, policy wonks, and other symbolic analysts
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.”
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
If space is now expanding, then at ever earlier times the universe must have been ever smaller. At some moment in the distant past, everything we now see—the ingredients responsible for every planet, every star, every galaxy, even space itself—must have been compressed to an infinitesimal speck that then swelled outward, evolving into the universe
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When we know something well, we don’t realize how abstractly we think about it. And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation. The nature of each experience shapes the way that classic prose is written. The metaphor of showing implies that there is something to see. The things in the world the writer is pointing to, then, are concrete: peopl
... See moreSteven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
the guiding metaphor of classic style: a writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader’s gaze to something in the world.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
In the textbook experiment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. The solution is to dump the thumbtacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, and stick the candle onto the box. Most people never figure this out because the
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Classic style is not the same as the common but unhelpful advice to “avoid abstraction.” Sometimes we do have to write about abstract ideas. What classic style does is explain them as if they were objects and forces that would be recognizable to anyone standing in a position to see them.