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.
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“Grammar texts may be the ultimate
challenge for the audiobook, but Arthur Morey’s fine rendering of cognitive
psychologist Steven Pinker’s guide to writing in the twenty-first century
proves the exception…His prose is conversational and engaging, and Morey easily
matches his tone and rhythms, so that one often forgets it’s a narrator one is
hearing, and not the author himself—the ultimate test of a satisfactory audio
experience for this reviewer. Whether heard one time for its general
principles, or again and again as a learning tool, this accessible, keenly
observed, and, in fact, witty and entertaining discourse on how we use our
language will be an unexpected pleasure for many. Winner of AudioFile Earphones
Award.”
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AudioFile