The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
amazon.com
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
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
This is an interesting way of explaining it
But the starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of
... See moreSteven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
The active parties are the writer and the reader, who are taking in the spectacle together, and the writer can refer to them with the good old pronoun we.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Remembering that classic style is a pretense also makes sense of the seemingly outlandish requirement that a writer know the truth before putting it into words and not use the writing process to organize and clarify his thoughts. Of course no writer works that way, but that is irrelevant.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
The early bird gets the worm, for example, is plain. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese is classic.