So, you want to say, 'He sent the poison candy that he received in the mail to the police.' That's harder than, 'He sent to the police the poison candy he received in the mail,' for example.' Steven Pinker: 'One way that translates into practical advice is, if you've got a big, hairy, complicated phrase, move it to the end of the sentence so that the reader doesn't have to hold it in mind while they're figuring out the structure of the sentence. Remember your reader's basic tolerance for the pace of information: His new book is 'The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.' His other books include 'The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language' and 'The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.' He tweets 7 Writing Style Lessons We Learned From Linguist Steven Pinkerġ. Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist and linguist at Harvard.

Steven Pinker will explain the science behind good prose at the Brattle Theatre Tuesday at 6 p.m. Instead, we would say, 'Today, the governor made good on his promise, and signed a law that makes bad writing a crime.'īut, why is there so much bad writing out there, and how do you learn to write well? In his new book, 'The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,' Steven Pinker uses some insights from linguistics and neuroscience to answer those questions. This means we try to avoid saying things like, 'Having promised to enact legislation that would exhort by a multitude of means, including criminal penalties, the governor affected the execution of a law to improve written composition for the advancement of comprehension.' Steven Pinker's new book is 'The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.' (jeffrey james pacres/Flickr) This article is more than 8 years old.Īs broadcasters, we're taught to write in clear, active declarative sentences.

The sense of style