6/29/2023 0 Comments The sense of style pinker![]() ![]() You have a hard time perfecting the art of writing if you don’t know what a subordinate clause is. You can’t perfect the art of photography if you don’t know what an f-stop is. But it’s helpful in evaluating writing advice, just as in any specialized pastime. There are many accomplished writers who probably could not identify a relative clause if they banged into it in the middle of the night. You emphasize that knowledge of grammar is important. That allows writers to distinguish the bogus rules from the helpful ones. ![]() ![]() And we have a body of scholarship that traces the history of these controversies. We have laboratory studies on what makes sentences hard to understand. And we know so much more about language than we did in the 20th century. In “The Elements of Style,” Strunk and White prohibit the verb “to contact” and the verb “to finalize.” In their day, that sounded like slang, jargon, pretentious business-speak. The style manuals from the second half of the 20th century are literally obsolete, and we have to reflect the fact that language changes. Steven Pinker’s new book, “ The Sense of Style,” offers “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.” He spoke from Boston. ![]()
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