The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
Pinker says: Respect your tools and break the rules. And much else besides!
Category: books
30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary
The 1950s content, paper, fonts, and typesetting make for a kind of armchair time-traveling experience.
The Complete Plain Words (2nd edition) by Ernest Gowers
Reading this British book published in 1978 (a revised version of the 1948 original) was like going on an archaeological expedition in a foreign country. The English recommended by the author differs from my...
Style by Joseph M. Williams
I never thought I would read the word “turgid” so many times in my entire life. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace repeats the word, of course, because it’s telling you how to avoid writing...
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
Everybody Writes is a book that Derek Zoolander would recommend to “adults who can’t write good and want to do other stuff good too”. If you’re one of those, then, by all means, share...
What You Need to Know about British and American English by George Davidson
I’ve come a long way since the days when I consistently spelled the word ‘British’ with two t’s, which is phonetically intuitive but correct nowhere on the planet. Nevertheless, there were still some new...
Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe
To create Thing Explainer, Randall drew and labeled pictures to—well—explain various scientific and cultural ideas, but he chose to write all the text in the book using only a thousand commonly-used English words, just...
The mission of a dictionary
If you accept a ‘word’ such as ‘alright’ (which I consider to be a mistake) just because it’s in the dictionary, for consistency you will probably also have to accept ‘words’ that you consider...
Why Johnny Can’t Read
Why Johnny Can’t Read is a rant, but the rant is justified if the ‘whole-word’ method was as dominant as the author, Rudolf Flesch, claims. How infuriating that someone assumed, and led a whole...
Déjà vu
A few weeks ago I was looking for a book on my language shelves. I noticed a book called A Study of Writing by I. J. Gelb. Separated from it by two or three...