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
One way to introduce a topic without metadiscourse is to open with a question: This chapter discusses the factors that cause names to rise and fall in popularity. What makes a name rise and fall in popularity?
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
show a draft to yourself, ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Every audience is spread out along a bell curve of sophistication, and inevitably we’ll bore a few at the top while baffling a few at the bottom; the only question is how many there will be of each. The curse of knowledge means that we’re more likely to overestimate the average reader’s familiarity with our little world than to underestimate it. An
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Multiply these daily frustrations by a few billion, and you begin to see that the curse of knowledge is a pervasive drag on the strivings of humanity, on a par with corruption, disease, and entropy.
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
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Thomas and Mark Turner have singled out one model of prose as an aspiration for such writers today. They call it classic style, and explain it in a wonderful little book called Clear and Simple as the Truth.
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images,
Steven Pinker • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Chunking is not just a trick for improving memory; it’s the lifeblood of higher intelligence.
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
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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