![]() ![]() It's loaded with examples, many of them very funny, and is of course lucidly written. ![]() I see this notion as being useful to us, the readers of Editing Matters, as we work to ensure that nothing gets in the way of a client's words being converted, in the reader's mind, into the intended ideas.įortunately, the book is nowhere near as confusing as my previous paragraph. An effective writer chooses and arranges words in a way that makes it more likely that the resulting web in the reader's mind bears some resemblance to what was in the writer's mind. The reader then absorbs the string of words and re-webs it into their own mental network. Pinker describes the web (of ideas), the string (of words) and the tree (of syntax): the tree allows the writer to convert the web into a string. Forcing a network of ideas into linear form gives rise to many of the stylistic problems that writers face. Pinker describes writing as 'a linear ordering of phrases which conveys a gnarly network of ideas'. In The Sense of Style, Pinker applies his understanding of cognitive language processing to questions of written style. ![]() Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist, but he has also produced well-regarded discussions of style, including 'Why academics stink at writing' ( Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 September 2014 ( )). ![]() The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century S Pinker, Penguin Books, 2015, 368pp, £11.14 (pbk), ISBN 978 0 14312 779 6 Reviewed by Lucy Metzger ![]()
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