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#Steven simple writer plus
They won’t know what you’re talking about.Ĭombat this curse, though, plus your terrible syntax, and all you have to do then is to make glorious, revelatory sense over the course of whatever it is you’re writing. You tell the school party visiting your office that you’re late to speak to them because an OCM meeting overran and the CG kept you back.
#Steven simple writer series
You end up writing a series of non-sequiturs, logical in their progression only to you. What disease is that? The curse of knowledge,” he writes thirty pages later, “is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” The problem is, you know so much that you can’t adequately express yourself. But it’s worth striving towards the classic ideal: “it is the strongest cure I know,” Pinker states, “for the disease that enfeebles academic, bureaucratic, corporate, legal, and official prose.” It’s trustworthy. It privileges the reader with a considered view of the world. Cartesian bon mots don’t tend to emerge fully sculpted, and their elegance masks the effort that went into them to quote Dolly Parton, as Pinker does: “You wouldn’t believe how much it costs to look this cheap”. Not just because fluency and articulacy are beautiful things in themselves, but because clean, clear style usually arises from logical, well-structured thought.
#Steven simple writer how to
In these, he sets out the benefits of classic style, how to avoid “the curse of knowledge”, the dangers awaiting the inadequate syntactician, and methods for ensuring coherence in your writing.Ĭlassic style is one of civilization’s great achievements. This isn’t just for the last chapter - a goldmine of usage advice - but also for the exceptional early chapters. The Sense of Style is a book you’ll end up wanting to thrust on your colleagues, to prescribe as set texts for all who enter any job which requires them to write. And if you come to doubt my style twice in two sentences, you might also reasonably doubt the thought process behind it.īut it’s not just at this granular level (did you cringe when you read granular? corporate-speak alert) that Pinker excels. He might also pick me up on “though not incorrect”, for the additional mental exertion required to unpick the double negative. He might, for instance, comment on my use in that last sentence of “retarding”, which, though not incorrect, will distract the politically sensitive reader. At many points in The Sense of Style, Pinker is able to point to empirical research that demonstrates the retarding effect of poor lexical and syntactical choices. And most writers, most of the time, wish to be understood straightforwardly and forthwith. “I am a psycholinguist and a cognitive scientist,” writes Pinker, early on, “and what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind?” Good style effectively engages. But it’s distracting it takes more effort to read it takes away from the reliability of a given text. We may know what’s meant when we see a grocer’s apostrophe or when someone refers to a single phenomena. In official contexts - in books, on company websites, on road signs, in stores, on television, and in countless other places - it’s absolutely right to be picky.
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Lead me not into temptation, I think, as their sordid misusage reveals them in their true colors. To point out an error in grammar or punctuation is, to me, no better than to tell someone they look rough today, or to ask them if they were always so hateful. Even when those who’re usually doing the snooting on my Facebook wall suffer a lapse, I hesitate. You can crush someone with a correction, however subtly administered.
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But with great power comes great responsibility.
![steven simple writer steven simple writer](https://www.chinausfocus.com/upload/avatar/author/20291.jpg)
I pride myself on being pretty good at spelling, punctuation, and grammar (although I’ve stopped putting that on my dating profile - it turns me off, let alone potential candidates).
#Steven simple writer manuals
Like Pinker, I’ve been known to dip into style manuals for pleasure. Is it better to err unwittingly or to be all crouching pedant, hidden snoot? This is perhaps a question more of lifestyle than writing style, but one I nevertheless contemplated throughout the happy week I spent surfing the pages of Steven Pinker‘s new writing guide, The Sense of Style. He offers no easy answers - sometimes it’s definitely better to put your foot down sometimes you’ll end up with egg on your face - but, having read it, I go back out into the world with a renewed sense of purpose and a better-calibrated sonar for the faux pas. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century