The Sense of Style

Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 2014

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Key Figures

Steven Pinker (The Author)

Steven Pinker brings his authority as a linguist, cognitive psychologist, author, and Harvard University professor to bear on The Sense of Style. More importantly, however, Pinker presents himself in the text as an avid reader, a lover of language, and a patient teacher. While not as quantifiable as his professional credentials, the “softer” aspects of Pinker’s persona are ultimately more important for building his credibility as someone worth listening to on the topic of writing style. Throughout the book, he consciously employs the “classic style” as laid out in Chapter 2, presenting himself as a guide who respects his readers. He provides multiple examples for nearly every phenomenon he describes, often juxtaposing passages side by side to discuss their relative merits, and he lays out his thinking in clear, logical steps. He is approachable without being condescending, writing in the first person and addressing the writer as “you.” Moreover, he displays a willingness to reflect on his own writing process to exemplify certain points. Finally, Pinker presents himself as someone with a keen interest in popular culture. His references range from Richard Dawkins to the Beatles, and the cartoons that appear throughout the text include both newspaper classics like Doonesbury and 2000s-era webcomics.

William Strunk and E. B. White

William Strunk and E. B. White are the authors of the popular writing style guide book, The Elements of Style, a touchstone throughout The Sense of Style. Pinker praises Strunk and White for delivering some sound writing advice and calls much of their work “as timeless as it is charming” (6). However, he also notes that these authors had a “tenuous grasp of grammar” (2) and often misdefined parts of speech and how to use them. He laments that some of their writing rules were rooted in strange rationalizations or personal preferences, not linguistic evidence. For instance, they rejected words such as “personalize” and “contact” (as a verb), and instructed writers to use the word “persons,” and never “people,” with number words, such as “five persons.” Pinker’s discussion of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style positions his own advice as a necessary successor to their work. By pointing out the flaws in their thinking, Pinker works to persuade his reader that this traditional advice is in need of an update, adding to his argument that not all writing rules should be taken seriously.

Pinker’s Exemplars

The Sense of Style aims to expose its readers to as many different kinds of effective writing as possible in a relatively small number of pages. In Chapter 1 in particular, Pinker dwells on long passages written by other people, demonstrating what each writer is doing and how they are doing it. Among the most important exemplars are (from Chapter 1) scientist Richard Dawkins, novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberg Goldstein, obituary writer Margalit Fox, journalist and historian Isabel Wilkerson, and (from Chapter 4) Cape Cod bird enthusiast Mike O’Connor. The range of Pinker’s references reflects his view that there are many kinds of effective writing.

For example, Pinker uses a passage from Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Warmth of Other Suns to illustrate how writers can write about social events and forces while still acknowledging the humanity and individuality of the people involved. He writes, “With an allergy to abstraction and a phobia of cliche, Wilkerson trains a magnifying glass on the historical blob called ‘The Great Migration’ and reveals the humanity of the people who compose it” (25). Pinker breaks down one of Wilkerson’s opening passages sentence by sentence, analyzing why each one effectively engages the reader’s interest and humanizes her subjects at the same time.

In the same chapter, Pinker analyzes excerpts from Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. (Goldstein is Pinker’s wife.) Pinker praises Goldstein for her use of imagery in Betraying Spinoza as she describes her childhood self from a photo. Pinker uses an excerpt from Goldstein’s novel as an example of how writers can create very lengthy sentences while still maintaining a sense of order. Pinker points to Goldstein’s skilled use of commas and connecting words to explain why her unusually long sentence is still clear and understandable.

Pinker’s Foils

In addition to providing examples of effective writing, Pinker also presents less effective prose. Many of these examples are humorous—such as headlines that illustrate “noun piling”—and short enough that the writer’s name can be left in the footnotes. Pinker does mention literary theorist Judith Butler by name in Chapter 1, but he is not the first to have criticized Butler’s style.

Pinker’s most extended engagement with a named literary foil is his use of passages from military historian John Keegan’s A History of Warfare in Chapter 5 to illustrate an argument about arcs of coherence. According to Pinker, the opening of A History of Warfare is “barely coherent,” beginning with a negation when he states what war is not, rather than making a claim about what war is. Pinker observes that this opening puts a mental burden on the reader to remember an unclear negation while taking in new information in the rest of the paragraph. Pinker also finds it confusing that Keegan then claims that in war “instinct is king,” but also writes that warmongering impulses begin in the intellect (171).

Pinker then refers to the second paragraph in A History of Warfare to demonstrate why writers must try to maintain a sense of proportion. Keegan argues that many people fail to understand the human penchant toward violence, but dedicates much of his second paragraph to describing how people have been consistently violent throughout history. Pinker argues that by dedicating a disproportionate number of words to describing the ubiquity of violence, Keegan undermines his point that many people deny this aspect of human nature. Pinker argues that this approach is ineffective, as Keegan fails to persuade his reader. Pinker also accuses Keegan of failing to include thematic consistency in his writing, preventing the reader from clearly following his argument. Pinker attributes all of these writing flaws to Keegan’s “professional narcissism,” suggesting that, ironically, Keegan’s successful career as a historian prompted him to neglect his writing’s prose, organization, and thematic development.

Pinker’s foils also include a particular kind of language purist, whose focus on rules over style makes good writing feel less accessible than it should. These foils go by various names in the text, from “style mavens” with “greybeard sensibilities” in the Prologue to Chapter 6’s “sticklers, pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots, nitpickers, traditionalists, language police, usage nannies, [etc.]” (188). These shadowy figures hover on the margins of Pinker’s text as the main impediment to a writer’s development—and as symbols of those who do not take seriously The Reader’s Experience.