science

The Sense of Style

The Sense of Style is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Sense of Style rather than just read about it. In short: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century is a 2014 English style guide written by cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author Steven Pinker. Building upon earlier guides, such as Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, it applies science to the process of writing, and explains its prescriptions by citing studies in r…

Key takeaways

The Sense of Style belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Sense of Style to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Sense of Style from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century is a 2014 English style guide written by cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author Steven Pinker. Building upon earlier guides, such as Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, it applies science to the process of writing, and explains its prescriptions by citing studies in related fields – e.g., grammatical phenomena, mental dynamics, and memory load – as well as history and criticism, to "distinguish the rules that enhance clarity, grace, and emotional resonance from those that are based on myths and misunderstandings". Pinker's prescriptions combine data from ballots given to the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, the usage notes of several dictionaries and style guides, the historical analyses in Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, the meta-analysis in Roy H. Copperud's American Usage and Style: The Consensus, and views from modern linguistics represented in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and the blog Language Log.

Reception The Sense of Style won Plain English Campaign's International Award for 2014, and was ranked among the best books of 2014 by The Economist, The Sunday Times, and Amazon. It received mainly positive reviews from several major publications, including The New York Times, Scientific American, and The Washington Post. Negative reviews appeared in The New Yorker and The Telegraph, which stated that Pinker "doesn't have anything new to say" and which criticized Pinker for allegedly "logrolling" in his choice of which authors to quote.

References

External links The Sense of Style on stevenpinker.com

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Sense of Style

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Sense of Style claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Sense of Style before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Sense of Style ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Sense of Style

In research: The Sense of Style appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Sense of Style in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Sense of Style is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2014 non-fiction books, Grammar books, Penguin Books books, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Sense of Style outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Sense of Style in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Sense of Style means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Sense of Style out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Sense of Style in simple terms?

Why does The Sense of Style matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Sense of Style?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Sense of Style.