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

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desertcart.com: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century: 9780143127796: Pinker, Steven: Books

Review: A style guide by someone who cares - Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style fits into the tradition of style guides that began with Fowler and continues up through Bryan Garner. It will inevitably be compared with Willard Stunk and E. B. White’s Elements of Style, that sputnik-era Seussification of grammar and style. But the real comparison is with Joseph Williams’s excellent, but somewhat dated, book Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, one of the first works to blend linguistics and style. Pinker adopts and updates some of Williams’s insights (with all due acknowledgment of course) and connect them even more closely to current research in psycholinguistics and grammar. Chapters 1-3 warm the reader up, with Pinker’s characteristic charm and good humor. In Chapter 1, “Good Writing,” Pinker reverse engineers (as he puts it) several examples of clear exposition, showing the value of simply thinking through what works in writing—strong starts, fresh idioms and diction, occasional playfulness, use of rhythm and meter, attention to the reader’s vantage point. Chapter 2, “A Window on the World,” bring in the work of Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner (in their book Clear and Simple as the Truth) which defines “the classic style.” That is the style which draws its strength from the writer’s helping the reader see the world in a new way. Strong writers show the informed reader with narrative, explanation and examples that meet the readers where they are. That is opposed of course to the academic (and especially post-modern style) and Pinker finds no dearth of examples to illustrate the difference. In Chapter 3, “The Curse of Knowledge,” Pinker explains the problem of specialists who are unable to see the world as their readers see it and thus over-complicate their prose with jargon, nominalizations, abbreviations, unexplained assumptions, and other insider shortcuts. Chapter 4 “The Web, The Tree, and the String” is a long chapter (really, it’s pages 76-138) on syntax. Pinker’s basic point here is that syntax is our tool for putting organization to thought and, moreover, that thinking about sentences as structured entities (modelled by tree diagrams) rather than simple flat strings of words can give us a richer outlook on many problems of style. It’s a fine chapter for linguists, but general readers may struggle a bit here. As more than one readers has noted, here Pinker himself seems to fall victim to the curse of knowledge. Chapter 5 “Arcs of Coherence” is another long chapter (pages 139-186) in which Pinker shows how writers build (or don’t build) coherence in sentences and paragraphs. Coherence involves carefully attending to the reader’s knowledge and to the pattern a writer develops through parallelism, consistency of diction, integration new ideas into ones just introduced, and continual focus on the point of the prose. Chapter 6, “Telling Right from Wrong,” is not so much a chapter as a separate style guide making up about a third of the book. Here Pinker gleefully takes on many the traditional rules and folk rules of English grammar, separating them into broad categories of grammar; quantity, quality and degree; diction; and punctuation. He explains, refines or corrects the traditional takes on grammar, doing so in a way will warm the heart of anyway who has ever been scolded by an ignoramus and capture the interest of the open-minded. Don’t skip the style guide; it’s got some gems on fewer vs. less, restrictive and non-restrictive, fused participles, and the use of commas. The Sense of Style has a few flaws (the curse of knowledge, for one) and it might have been shorter in chapters 4 and 5. But overall it is a fine book, well written and well thought out, by someone who not only cares about language but cares about the facts.
Review: A great book - This can be challenging to understand sometimes depending on your reading level. But it's an excellent book nonetheless. Everyone wanting to learn to write or understand linguistics should give this book a try!

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #19,953 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #13 in Grammar Reference (Books) #28 in Words, Language & Grammar Reference #38 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars (2,345) |
| Dimensions  | 5.36 x 0.77 x 8 inches |
| Edition  | Reprint |
| ISBN-10  | 0143127799 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0143127796 |
| Item Weight  | 2.31 pounds |
| Language  | English |
| Print length  | 368 pages |
| Publication date  | September 22, 2015 |
| Publisher  | Penguin Books |

## Images

![The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71ycoxPLzFL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A style guide by someone who cares
*by E***A on November 27, 2014*

Steven Pinker’s <I>The Sense of Style</I> fits into the tradition of style guides that began with Fowler and continues up through Bryan Garner. It will inevitably be compared with Willard Stunk and E. B. White’s <I>Elements of Style</I>, that sputnik-era Seussification of grammar and style. But the real comparison is with Joseph Williams’s excellent, but somewhat dated, book <I>Style: Towards Clarity and Grace</I>, one of the first works to blend linguistics and style. Pinker adopts and updates some of Williams’s insights (with all due acknowledgment of course) and connect them even more closely to current research in psycholinguistics and grammar. Chapters 1-3 warm the reader up, with Pinker’s characteristic charm and good humor. In Chapter 1, “Good Writing,” Pinker reverse engineers (as he puts it) several examples of clear exposition, showing the value of simply thinking through what works in writing—strong starts, fresh idioms and diction, occasional playfulness, use of rhythm and meter, attention to the reader’s vantage point. Chapter 2, “A Window on the World,” bring in the work of Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner (in their book <I>Clear and Simple as the Truth</I>) which defines “the classic style.” That is the style which draws its strength from the writer’s helping the reader see the world in a new way. Strong writers show the informed reader with narrative, explanation and examples that meet the readers where they are. That is opposed of course to the academic (and especially post-modern style) and Pinker finds no dearth of examples to illustrate the difference. In Chapter 3, “The Curse of Knowledge,” Pinker explains the problem of specialists who are unable to see the world as their readers see it and thus over-complicate their prose with jargon, nominalizations, abbreviations, unexplained assumptions, and other insider shortcuts. Chapter 4 “The Web, The Tree, and the String” is a long chapter (really, it’s pages 76-138) on syntax. Pinker’s basic point here is that syntax is our tool for putting organization to thought and, moreover, that thinking about sentences as structured entities (modelled by tree diagrams) rather than simple flat strings of words can give us a richer outlook on many problems of style. It’s a fine chapter for linguists, but general readers may struggle a bit here. As more than one readers has noted, here Pinker himself seems to fall victim to the curse of knowledge. Chapter 5 “Arcs of Coherence” is another long chapter (pages 139-186) in which Pinker shows how writers build (or don’t build) coherence in sentences and paragraphs. Coherence involves carefully attending to the reader’s knowledge and to the pattern a writer develops through parallelism, consistency of diction, integration new ideas into ones just introduced, and continual focus on the point of the prose. Chapter 6, “Telling Right from Wrong,” is not so much a chapter as a separate style guide making up about a third of the book. Here Pinker gleefully takes on many the traditional rules and folk rules of English grammar, separating them into broad categories of grammar; quantity, quality and degree; diction; and punctuation. He explains, refines or corrects the traditional takes on grammar, doing so in a way will warm the heart of anyway who has ever been scolded by an ignoramus and capture the interest of the open-minded. Don’t skip the style guide; it’s got some gems on <I>fewer</I> vs. <I>less</i>, restrictive and non-restrictive, fused participles, and the use of commas. <I>The Sense of Style</I> has a few flaws (the curse of knowledge, for one) and it might have been shorter in chapters 4 and 5. But overall it is a fine book, well written and well thought out, by someone who not only cares about language but cares about the facts.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A great book
*by V***A on December 11, 2025*

This can be challenging to understand sometimes depending on your reading level. But it's an excellent book nonetheless. Everyone wanting to learn to write or understand linguistics should give this book a try!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Not Quite As Wonderful As I Hoped, But Still Very Good
*by A***S on November 22, 2014*

I loved Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" and "The Better Angels of Our Nature", and I love style guides, so I eagerly awaited the release of this book. Alas, when it came out and I read it, my high hopes were disappointed. This book provides an interesting and potentially very useful approach to writing well (or more properly not writing badly), basing its analysis of style and (mostly) grammar on the way people think, not on arbitrary rules. In some parts, it meets that objective; in others, I think that it falls short. Starting with the best, Chapter 5 ("Arcs of Coherence") goes beyond grammar to examine style (clarity, impact, coherence) more broadly. I found this very interesting, and very unusual in that most writing about style stops with grammar. Chapter 3 ("The Curse of Knowledge") also sparked some definite "ah ha!" moments. Writers who are expert in a field do indeed too often assume that their readers know more about a subject than the readers in fact do, because the writers are so immersed in the field themselves. The book is well worth reading for these two chapters alone, and some other sections are also interesting and helpful. In addition, the overall tone -- reasons not rules -- is a big positive, and the book is engagingly written. Finally, thank you Mr. Pinker for using "she" rather than "he" as the generic pronoun a lot of the time. But one section of the book -- the one on grammar -- does not live up to the good bits, or indeed to Pinker's own central theme. Again and again, he stresses that clarity is essential to good writing. His own section on grammar, however, was not entirely clear to me. In particular, the introduction of "deep structure" into his discussion of syntax (Chapter 4 -- "The Web, The Tree, and The String") left me somewhat baffled. Pinker himself says that if a reader says "I think I understand it", she probably doesn't. In reading through this section (more than once), I kept thinking "I think I understand it". And there was something familiar about that fuzzy feeling: over the years, I have read a good bit about language and linguistics, but Noam Chomsky always left me thinking "I think I understand it". Upon reconsideration, I don't think I did, and I don't think that I fully grasped Pinker's Chapter 4 either. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the process of writing: you can learn a lot. But I would not say that this book is a definitive guide to current English style, which is I suppose what I was hoping for. Still, I definitely intend to read it again, and will update my review after doing so.

## Frequently Bought Together

- The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
- The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition

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