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.
Steven Pinker is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching, and books, he has been named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World Today and Foreign Policy's 100 Global Thinkers.
- 基于认知科学破除知识诅咒
- 倡导古典风格与读者思维
- 用语言学原理指导清晰写作
- 受困于学术写作障碍者
- 追求逻辑清晰的理性派
- 希望提升英文表达者
- 重点研读前半部分原理
- 结合原著体会风格差异
- 不必死记琐碎语法规则
- 理论扎实且极具实操性
- 语言学家身体力行的典范
- 打破传统写作指南的刻板
本导读基于书籍简介、目录、原文摘录、短评和书评生成，不等同于全文精读。
- "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghos"
- "The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns "
- "The metaphor of conversation implies that the reader is cooperative. The writer can count on her to read between the lines, catch his drift, and connect the dots, without his having to spell out every step in his train of thought."
- "The graybeard sensibilities of the style mavens come not just from an under appreciation of the fact of language change but from a lack of reflection on their own psychology. As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline."
- "The abstruseness of the contest winners' writing is deceptive.Most academics can effortlessly dispense this kind of sludge."
- "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. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:"
- "We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. 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."
- "A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts."
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Enlightenment Now
The Better Angels of Our Nature
The Language Instinct
El instinto del lenguaje / The Language Instinct