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

An old cartoon captioned “The PhD thesis” shows a little boy firing an arrow into the air, seeing where it lands, walking over to it, and painting a target around that spot. It’s not how science should work, but it’s sometimes how writing must work.