The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century QUOTES

1 " As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

2 " I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

3 " History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of "otherness" which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of "civilised warfare. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

4 " We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

5 " Literate people should know how to think about grammar. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

6 " Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

7 " As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

8 " The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

9 " It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

10 " Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their message across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous-as Strunk and White put it, "death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram." Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste, and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land.

Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with." And if that isn't enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are "huge turn-offs." As one client said, "If you're trying to date a woman, I don't expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren't you trying to put your best foot forward?"

Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And as we shall see in the first chapter, this thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

11 " Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

12 " A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

13 " we can remind ourselves of the reasons to strive for good style: to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

14 " Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images, "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

15 " In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

16 " The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

17 " The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

18 " Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

19 " The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

20 " We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions. "

― Steven Pinker , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century