Book Review: ‘The Sense of Style’ by Steven Pinker
If you’re like me and had to read The Elements of Style by Strunk and White in school, then you need to read this book. That’s because The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker will undo all the bad advice in The Elements of Style that you knew in your heart was wrong.
Never start a sentence with “and” or “but.” Never end a sentence with a preposition. That advice never made sense because people don’t talk like that, and don’t write like that either.
Essentially, Strunk and White tried to paternalistically force new stylistic rules on people because that’s what they thought was right. Pinker tells you how the English language works today—and in many cases, how it’s worked for a hundred or more years—and backs it all up with research.
I give it 5 stars, 6 dog-ears, and 1 Post-it.
Things I dog-eared and Post-it’d in The Sense of Style include:
- A list of all the parts of speech
- A list of “morbidly obese phrases,” such as “in the event that,” which can be simplified down to just “if”
- A discussion of structural parallelism, which is a great rhetorical device
- The principle of saving the heaviest for last
- The cognitive philosophy of introducing a topic before your comment
- A list of words and what they mean according to purists and what they mean according to common usage
Related posts:
This vs. that: Novel-writing books
Using Google Trends to track language evolution
Book review: ‘Understanding Show, Don’t Tell (And Really Getting It)’ by Janice Hardy
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