"The Sense of Style is not a reference manual in which you can find the answer to every question about hyphenation and capitalization. Nor is it a remedial guide for badly educated students who have yet to master the mechanics of a sentence. Like the classic guides, it is designed for people who know how to write and want to write better."
Whether or not we ultimately secure writing endorsements from our LinkedIn connections, all of us should want to improve the words, sentences and paragraphs we continually ask our readers to read.
It shows empathy. It respects irreplaceable time and attention. And “a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, an elegant turn of phrase” can be a source of delight for those whom we most want to delight.
For me, what makes this book most actionable is its encouragement to treat the entire writing process as “a form of pleasurable mastery.” To do that, we must be willing to take a circuitous path to success that may involve repeated course corrections.
"An aspiring writer could be forgiven for thinking that learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp, with a sergeant barking at you for every errant footfall. Why not think of it instead as a form of pleasurable mastery, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game."
Full disclosure: My fingers are trembling above my QWERTY keypad as I type. I am, after all, writing a summary of a book on writing and it’s rather disconcerting. What if a subject and verb fail to agree? What if I end a sentence with a preposition? What if the entire summary bores you to tears? What if I carelessly slip in more clichés like “bore you to tears”?
Pinker would have us approach our writing with the same enthusiasm we bring to our favorite hobbies and other endeavors. We must strive for excellence without obsessing over those purists more concerned about supposed perfection than improved clarity.
Missteps are part of the journey. Let’s enjoy the process of bettering our writing with each new attempt.
"The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know."
When we write, it’s easy to assume our readers know the points we’re trying to make and understand all of the terminology we’re using to make them.
He’s not saying a biologist must spell out messenger ribonucleic acid every time she instead chooses the mRNA abbreviation. But he does suggest a fellow scientist could replace “murine model” with “rats and mice” without using up any additional space on the page or being any less scientific.
This concept of the curse of knowledge reminded me of the board game, Trivial Pursuit. When it first hit store shelves in the Eighties, many in my circle played it. Invariably, a questioner would pick up a card, read the question and whine, “you get all the easy ones,” because everyone simply had to know the name of the videographer who’d captured the historic footage of JFK’s assassination.
Our first drafts will no doubt include many similar assumptions. And those early drafts will, at times, cause our readers to feel as though they’re late to a conversation that had been going on without them.
"Dealing with matters of usage is not like playing chess, proving theorems, or solving textbook problems in physics, where the rules are clear and flouting them is an error. It is more like research, journalism, criticism, and other exercises of discernment."
Steven Pinker contends that good writing involves choice after choice after choice. When must we follow the letter of usage law? On what occasions would our readers be better served by splitting an infinitive? It’s up to us to decide.