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

by Steven Pinker

the starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader.

It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate. As Dolly Parton said, “You wouldn’t believe how much it costs to look this cheap.

previews that read like a scrunched-up table of contents are there to help the writer, not the reader.

Another bad habit of self-conscious writing is the prissy use of quotation marks—sometimes called shudder quotes or scare quotes—to distance the writer from a common idiom:

Quotation marks have a number of legitimate uses, such as reproducing someone else’s words (She said, “Fiddlesticks!”), mentioning a word as a word rather than using it to convey its meaning (The New York Times uses “millenniums,” not “millennia”), and signaling that the writer does not accept the meaning of a word as it is being used by others in this context (They executed their sister to preserve the family’s “honor”). Squeamishness about one’s own choice of words is not among them. Classic style is confident about its own voice. If you’re not comfortable using an expression without apologetic quotation marks, you probably shouldn’t be using it at all.