The Sense of Style
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The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
From the author of Enlightenment Now, a short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker. Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care? In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn't carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.
Pinker, Steven: - Steven Pinker is Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology at MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has earned prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association. Pinker has also received many awards for his teaching at MIT and for his books How the Mind Works (which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and The Language Instinct. He is an elected fellow of several scientific societies, associate editor of Cognition, and a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He has written for the New York Times, Time, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and Technology Review.
SKU | Unavailable |
ISBN 13 | 9780670025855 |
ISBN 10 | 0670025852 |
Title | The Sense of Style |
Author | Steven Pinker |
Condition | Unavailable |
Binding Type | Hardback |
Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc |
Year published | 2014-09-30 |
Number of pages | 368 |
Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
Note | Unavailable |