Read any good books lately? Rate them here

[Alex K]

Ok I finally got all the way trough Pinker's The Sense of Style, not because it took much effort, but because of other time constraints.



I would rate it very highly for the fact alone that it is a book about grammar and style which is entertaining. Now, I don't think it is the be-all and end-all of style guides (and Pinker certainly doesn't claim that), but I'd say it has definitely helped me see some things more clearly. Since I'm writing two books at the moment (albeit not in English), I catch myself thinking WWPD very, very frequently. He starts with a bunch of examples from newspapers and other literature which are simply witty and insightful in their own right, such that one even learns something about completely unrelated subjects! As I've said in the "books I can't shut up about" thread or somewhere, Pinker advocates a style of nonfic prose which he calls classic style. This is right up my alley of popular science writing, and since I share his taste there, the book speaks to me. Maybe one can gain insights for writing fiction as well, but the emphasis is definitely on non-fiction and science writing.

After outlining what his idea of classic style is, he goes into some more formal grammar, scaring the hell out of me with sentence diagrams. Fortunately, the discussion about sentence structure was comprehensible without the fracking diagrams. And that says I (*), who makes a living working with diagrams. Anyhew. In the end, there's some entertaining (to me at least) commentary on word choices, with some of which I fiercely disagree - for example, he says that one should give up on insisting that Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster. Nevers! And "presently" totes means "soon", not ever "now".

If I wanted to summarize his attitude towards writing, I'd say he takes a very pragmatic approach in which stylistic rules are undogmatic and instead always purpose-driven for maximum readability, clarity and minimal ambiguity, while his classic style attempts to have the reader see eye-to-eye with the author. And isn't that nice.

(*) lame inside joke for those who have read the book