The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

by Steven Pinker

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:

Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché (“Since the dawn of time”), not with a banality (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of . . .”), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.

The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.

they do not hide the passion and relish that drive them to tell us about their subjects. They write as if they have something important to say. But no, that doesn’t capture it. They write as if they have something important to show.

have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.

The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation.

In classic style the writer has worked hard to find something worth showing and the perfect vantage point from which to see it.

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.

As Dolly Parton said, “You wouldn’t believe how much it costs to look this cheap.”

if a listener’s mind momentarily wanders, the passage she has missed is gone forever. It’s not as necessary in writing, where a reader can backtrack and look up what she’s missed.

Good writing takes advantage of a reader’s expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.

One way to introduce a topic without metadiscourse is to open with a question:

The summary should be self-contained, almost as if the material being summarized had never existed.

When a grammatical construction is associated with politicians you can be sure that it provides a way to evade responsibility.

A concrete and conversational style does more than make professional verbiage easier to read; it can be a matter of life and death.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Call it the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.

Good prose is never written by a committee.

the unconscious mastery of language that is our birthright as humans is not enough to allow us to write good sentences.

When enough careful writers and speakers fail to do something that a pencil-and-paper analysis of syntax says they should, it may mean that it’s the pencil-and-paper analysis that is wrong, not the speakers and writers.

How does a writer manage to turn out such tortuous syntax? It happens when he shovels phrase after phrase onto the page in the order in which each one occurs to him. The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily recovered by a reader. It’s a syntactic version of the curse of knowledge. The writer can see the links among the concepts in his internal web of knowledge, and has forgotten that a reader needs to build an orderly tree to decipher them from his string of words.

it’s good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don’t like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.

One way to fashion an outline is to jot your ideas on a page or on index cards more or less at random and then look for ones that seem to belong together.

This divide-and-conquer strategy is better than repeatedly allowing counterexamples to intrude into the main line of an argument while browbeating readers into looking away.

There is a big difference between a coherent passage of writing and a flaunting of one’s erudition, a running journal of one’s thoughts, or a published version of one’s notes. A coherent text is a designed object: an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connectors that tie one proposition to the next.