I think about how language works so that I can best explain how language works. I am a psycholinguist and a cognitive scientist, and what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind? It’s all the more captivating to someone who seeks to explain these fields to a wide readership. I like to read style manuals for another reason, the one that sends botanists to the garden and chemists to the kitchen: it’s a practical application of our science. Nearly a century after Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style - a book of such legendary status that it has even germinated a rap - Harvard’s Steven Pinker steps in to alleviate Darwin’s lament with The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century ( public library). “It is a more reliable key to character than the physiognomy of the body.” “Style is the physiognomy of the mind,” wrote Schopenhauer. You have to learn to write well.”īut even as we master this rather unnatural human application, the difference between good writing and great writing is vast, bridged only by the miraculous mastery of style.
And yet our insatiable hunger for advice on writing suggests that it remains an unnatural act - even legendary Mad Man David Ogilvy knew this when he penned his ten commandments of writing a century after Darwin, prefacing them with this simple statement: “Good writing is not a natural gift.
“Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children,” Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” While baking and brewing undoubtedly have their place in culture, it is writing that has emerged as the defining record of our civilization - our most enduring and expansive catalog of thought, of discourse, of human imagination.
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