The Sense of Style

The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

By: Steven Pinker

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times best-selling author Steven Pinker.

Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?

In The Sense of Style, the best-selling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the 21st century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.

In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish.

Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2014 Steven Pinker (P)2014 Penguin Group

Great audio book! Will be listening to it again.

This is the first audio book that I have listed to by Pinker. Usually i read his books.

great read, great advice

this book is worth more than all the composition classes I've had throughout high school and college.

Great book, but a bit too complex for listening

Overall, the book is great. However, some chapters are meant to be read and not listened, as they present complex rules about syntax and grammar.

Defence against Grammar Nazis

The content of this book is indispensable, and the narration of the audiobook suits the writing style. If you are looking for help and formulating your writing, and are confused by some of the ambiguous usage advice, you may find resolution and an ally.

A good addition to a writer's collection

This book is a good addition to a writer's collection - especially for people in academia. Although a little stuffy in tone, it provides some great insights and guidance. I would recommend getting a physical copy to follow along, since some of the examples are easier to follow in writing.

Common sense approach that changed my mind

I enjoyed other books by Steven Pinker but this is my favorite. He solved a host of grammar problems for the time being.

I've been corrected on grammar a lot and confused a lot. One can't please everyone unless one never talks.

For Pinker the main thing is communication, not following rules. The rules change; they keep changing.

A stylish read

As an editor, avid reader and occasional writer, I appreciate and agree with most of what Stephen Pinker has to say about the language, the rules that govern it and the myths and misconceptions that surround it. But in the few areas where we disagree, I find his arguments often unconvincing and occasionally hypocritical and even ironic. Even so, I did learn and thing or two, so it was a worthwhile investment of my time. He is a brilliant man.

A well-researched, beautifully written guide.

This is a masterwork from a remarkable scholar writing with grace and class. It is jam-packed with brilliant insights into written English.

Pinker + Morey = Win!

Disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of both Steven Pinker and Arthur Morey, and the combination of excellent writing and perfect narration they represent for me made this an automatic purchase and an easy 5-star rating.

What's more, I'm a language geek. I love grammar. I love writing. A whole book about the way English (note: American English) works, complete with abstruse technical terms and PDF charts, is a delight to me.

I mention all this because The Sense of Style is clearly not everybody's cup of tea, no matter how brilliantly read.

And it is brilliantly read, but still, I had to consult the charts several times, and listen to the whole book twice before some of its more abstract ideas sank in. (Yes, sank. Not sunk.) I thought I was well-versed in English, but Pinker covers a bunch of advanced concepts of language structure and the mind that simply weren't understood way back when I was in "grammar" school. I learned a lot. I'll probably end up buying a visual version for reference.

It's fair to say that Pinker's work is all biased to the political left, and to a liberal and progressive view of the world in general, and language in particular. His cultural references place his origins so squarely in time that I knew he was born in 1954 without checking Wikipedia, and I knew that he tended to the hippie side of the spectrum without looking at a picture of him. He is absolutely not a prescriptive grammarian, and readers interested in a conservative view of language and culture might find this book hard to swallow.

Not me, though. This book immediately changed the way I read, and is having a growing impact on how I write. It confirmed me in some of my language biases, showed me the error of my ways in others, and gave me tools for understanding more clearly than ever what makes bad writing bad and good writing beautiful.

More suitable as a regular book

I listened to this book as an audio book, but I would imagine it to be better suited for reading. There are lots of examples of good and bad structuring of sentences, the subtleties and differences of which can be hard to pick up in audio form.

That isn't to say that the narration is bad, in fact, it is quite good. Merely that you'll probably get more out of it in writing.