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
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 don’ts
... 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.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
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.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
They write as if they have something important to show. And that, we shall see, is a key ingredient in the sense of style.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
In summary: show, not tell