I am really a big fan of Steven Pinker after reading his masterworks The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now and The Blank Slate, all of them show me a great view of human future. So when I first suggested to read a style book of him, I thought it would be a classic book about 20 years ago, to my surprise, this book published only four years.
Steven Pinker always have a great vision to write a book, The Elements of Style surely can’t be an exception:
My discomfort with the classic style manuals has convinced me that we need a writing guide for the twenty-first century. It’s not that I have the desire, to say nothing of the ability, to supplant ‘The Elements of Style’. Writers can profit by reading more than one style guide, and much of Strunk and White (as it is commonly called) is as timeless as it is charming. But much of it is not. Strunk was born in 1869, and today’s writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century.
Steven Pinker distinguish styles as two types: classic style and practice style, classic style is ‘showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation’, and practice style is “to satisfy the reader’s need, may conform to a fixed template, brief because the reader needs the information in a timely manner”, I think Steven Pinker’s style book is suit for the latter, languages are changing frequently, as well as the practice style rules
list all detail topics in this book (my most favorite part):
GRAMMAR
adjectives and adverbs
ain’t
and, because, but, or, so, also
between you and I
can versus may
dangling modifiers
fused participles (possessives with gerunds)
if-then
like, as, such as
possessive antecedents
preposition at the end of a sentence
predicative nominative
sequence of tenses and other perspective shifts
shall and will
split infinitives
subjunctive mood and irrealis were
than and as
that and which
verbing and other neologisms
who and whom
QUANTITY, QUALITY, AND DEGREE
absolute and graded qualities (very unique)
singulars and plurals (none is versus none are)
duals and plurals (between/among and other distinctions between two and more than two)
things and stuff (count nouns, mass nouns and ten items or less)
masculine and feminine (nonsexist language and singular they)
DICTION
75 words you may problematic use
PUNCTUATION
commas and other connectors (colons, semicolons, and dashes)
apostrophes
quotation marks
‘self-conscious writer’ as defined by Steven Pinker, I quite like this definition because I am used to be one, don’t care about the reader, always confuse them, full of misspelling, I don’t want be one in English writing any more, so come on~
This is a video of Steven Pinker by Talk at Google:
