The Sense of Style
The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
(Sprache: Englisch)
From the author of Enlightenment Now, 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...
Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being...
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From the author of Enlightenment Now, 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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Prologue
I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White s The Elements of Style in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It s not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It s also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice. William Strunk s course notes on writing, which his student E. B. White turned into their famous little book, was studded with gems of self-exemplification such as Write with nouns and verbs, Put the emphatic words of a sentence at the end, and best of all, his prime directive, Omit needless words. Many eminent stylists have applied their gifts to explaining the art, including Kingsley Amis, Jacques Barzun, Ambrose Bierce, Bill Bryson, Robert Graves, Tracy Kidder, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, F. L. Lucas, George Orwell, William Safire, and of course White himself, the beloved author of Charlotte s Web and Stuart Little. Here is the great essayist reminiscing about his teacher:
I like to read style manuals for another reason, the one that sends botanists to the garden and chemists to the kitchen: it s a practical application of our science. I am a psycholinguist and a cognitive scientist, and what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind? It s all the more captivating to someone who seeks to explain these fields to a wide readership. I think about how language works so that I can best explain how language works.
But my professional acquaintance with language has led me to read the traditional manuals with a growing sense of unease. Strunk and White, for all their intuitive feel for style, had a tenuous grasp of grammar.2 They misdefined terms such as phrase, participle, and relative clause, and in steering their readers away from passive verbs and toward active
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transitive ones they botched their examples of both. There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground, for instance, is not in the passive voice, nor does The cock s crow came with dawn contain a transitive verb. Lacking the tools to analyze language, they often struggled when turning their intuitions into advice, vainly appealing to the writer s ear. And they did not seem to realize that some of the advice contradicted itself: Many a tame sentence . . . can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice uses the passive voice to warn against the passive voice. George Orwell, in his vaunted Politics and the English Language, fell into the same trap when, without irony, he derided prose in which the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active. 3
Self-contradiction aside, we now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader s attention and memory. A skilled writer should know what those functions are and push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naïve style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.
Style manuals that are innocent of linguistics also are crippled in dealing with the aspect of writing that evokes the most emotion: correct and incorrect usage. Many style manuals treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation. But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore
Self-contradiction aside, we now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader s attention and memory. A skilled writer should know what those functions are and push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naïve style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.
Style manuals that are innocent of linguistics also are crippled in dealing with the aspect of writing that evokes the most emotion: correct and incorrect usage. Many style manuals treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation. But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore
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Autoren-Porträt von Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has been listed among Foreign Policy magazine s Top 100 Public Intellectuals and Time s The 100 Most Influential People in the World. He was the chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary 2008-2018.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Steven Pinker
- 2014, 368 Seiten, Maße: 15,3 x 24,3 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: Penguin US
- ISBN-10: 0670025852
- ISBN-13: 9780670025855
- Erscheinungsdatum: 01.09.2014
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for The Sense of Style[The Sense of Style] is more contemporary and comprehensive than The Elements of Style, illustrated with comic strips and cartoons and lots of examples of comically bad writing. [Pinker s] voice is calm, reasonable, benign, and you can easily see why he s one of Harvard s most popular lecturers.
The New York Times
Pinker's linguistical learning is considerable. His knowledge of grammar is extensive and runs deep. He also takes a scarcely hidden delight in exploding tradition. He describes his own temperament as "both logical and rebellious." Few things give him more pleasure than popping the buttons off what he takes to be stuffed shirts.
The Wall Street Journal
[W]hile The Sense of Style is very much a practical guide to clear and compelling writing, it s also far more . In the end, Pinker s formula for good writing is pretty basic: write clearly, try to follow the rules most of the time but only the when they make sense. It s neither rocket science nor brain surgery. But the wit and insight and clarity he brings to that simple formula is what makes this book such a gem.
Time.com
Erudite and witty With its wealth of helpful information and its accessible approach, The Sense of Style is a worthy addition to even the most overburdened shelf of style manuals.
Shelf Awareness
Forget Strunk and White s rules cognitive science is a surer basis for clear and cogent writing, according to this iconoclastic guide from bestselling Harvard psycholinguist Pinker... Every writer can profit from and every writer can enjoy Pinker s analysis of the ways in which skillfully chosen words engage the mind.
Publishers Weekly (starred)
Yet another how-to book on writing? Indeed, but this is one of the best to come along in many years, a model of intelligent signposting and syntactical comportment Pinker's vade mecum is a worthy addition to any writer s library.
Kirkus
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Reviews
In this witty and practical book on the art of writing, Pinker applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the crafting of clear, elegant prose: #requiredreading.
Publishers Weekly, PW pick Fall 2014 Announcements
Who better than a best-selling linguist and cognitive scientist to craft a style guide showing us how to use language more effectively?
Library Journal
[A] dense, fascinating analysis of the many ways communication can be stymied by word choice, placement, stress, and the like. [Pinker s] explanations run rich and deep, complemented by lists, cartoons, charts on diagramming sentences, and more.
Booklist
This book is a graceful and clear smackdown to the notion that English is going to the proverbial dogs. Pinker has written the Strunk & White for a new century while continuing to discourage baseless notions such as that the old slogan should have been Winston tastes good AS a cigarette should.
John McWhorter, author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue and The Power of Babel
Great stuff! Only Steven Pinker could have written this marvelous book, and thank heaven he has. Good writing can flip the way the world is perceived, he writes, and The Sense of Style will flip the way you think about good writing. Pinker s curiosity and delight illuminate every page, and when he says style can make the world a better place, we believe him.
Patricia T. O Conner, author of Woe Is I and, with Stewart Kellerman, Origins of the Specious
Praise for The Better Angels of Our Nature
"A supremely important book...a masterly achievement."
The New York Times Book Review
"Masterly."
The Wall Street Journal
"One of the most important books I've read--not just this year, but ever."
Bill Gates
Praise for The Stuff of Thought
"Packed with information...Clear, witty, attractively written."
The New York Review of Books
"A display of fiercely intricate intelligence."
The Times (London)
"Engaging and provocative . . . It's good to have a mind as lively and limpid as his bringing the ideas of cognitive science to the public."
Douglas Hofstadter, Los Angeles Times
"Curious, inventive, fearless, naughty."
The New York Times
Praise for The Blank Slate
"Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read . . . also highly persuasive."
Time
"Ought to be read by anybody who . . . thinks they already know where they stand on the science wars. . . . It could change their minds."
The Economist
"Pinker is a star, and the world of science is lucky to have him." Richard Dawkins
quotes
In this witty and practical book on the art of writing, Pinker applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the crafting of clear, elegant prose: #requiredreading.
Publishers Weekly, PW pick Fall 2014 Announcements
Who better than a best-selling linguist and cognitive scientist to craft a style guide showing us how to use language more effectively?
Library Journal
[A] dense, fascinating analysis of the many ways communication can be stymied by word choice, placement, stress, and the like. [Pinker s] explanations run rich and deep, complemented by lists, cartoons, charts on diagramming sentences, and more.
Booklist
This book is a graceful and clear smackdown to the notion that English is going to the proverbial dogs. Pinker has written the Strunk & White for a new century while continuing to discourage baseless notions such as that the old slogan should have been Winston tastes good AS a cigarette should.
John McWhorter, author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue and The Power of Babel
Great stuff! Only Steven Pinker could have written this marvelous book, and thank heaven he has. Good writing can flip the way the world is perceived, he writes, and The Sense of Style will flip the way you think about good writing. Pinker s curiosity and delight illuminate every page, and when he says style can make the world a better place, we believe him.
Patricia T. O Conner, author of Woe Is I and, with Stewart Kellerman, Origins of the Specious
Praise for The Better Angels of Our Nature
"A supremely important book...a masterly achievement."
The New York Times Book Review
"Masterly."
The Wall Street Journal
"One of the most important books I've read--not just this year, but ever."
Bill Gates
Praise for The Stuff of Thought
"Packed with information...Clear, witty, attractively written."
The New York Review of Books
"A display of fiercely intricate intelligence."
The Times (London)
"Engaging and provocative . . . It's good to have a mind as lively and limpid as his bringing the ideas of cognitive science to the public."
Douglas Hofstadter, Los Angeles Times
"Curious, inventive, fearless, naughty."
The New York Times
Praise for The Blank Slate
"Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read . . . also highly persuasive."
Time
"Ought to be read by anybody who . . . thinks they already know where they stand on the science wars. . . . It could change their minds."
The Economist
"Pinker is a star, and the world of science is lucky to have him." Richard Dawkins
quotes
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