
The Sense of Style
The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
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Narrated by:
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Arthur Morey
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By:
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Steven Pinker
About this listen
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.
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Performance
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In this delightful, acclaimed bestseller, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness?
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Excellent, but a difficult listen.
- By David Roseberry on 12-11-11
By: Steven Pinker
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When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .
- Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
- By: Steven Pinker
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.
By: Steven Pinker
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On Writing Well: Audio Collection
- By: William Zinsser
- Narrated by: William Zinsser
- Length: 2 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
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This expanded audio collection presents William Zinsser's On Writing Well, the classic teaching book that has sold more than 1 million copies, together with a new 90-minute section that tells you how to write a memoir.
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This is not the described book.
- By Brianna on 11-06-13
By: William Zinsser
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The Elements of Style (Recorded Books Edition)
- By: William Strunk Jr., E. B. White
- Narrated by: Frank McCourt
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
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The Elements of Style has long been a valued and beloved resource for all writers. Hailed for its directness and clever insight, this unorthodox textbook was born from a professor's love for the written word and perfected years later by one of his students: famed author E. B. White. Ever since its first publication in 1959, writers have turned to this book for its wise and accessible advice.
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Required Reading
- By T. C. Pile on 12-07-08
By: William Strunk Jr., and others
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How to Write a Sentence
- And How to Read One
- By: Stanley Fish
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Like a seasoned sportscaster, Fish marvels at the adeptness of finely crafted sentences and breaks them down into digestible morsels, giving listeners an instant play-by-play. Drawing on a wide range of great writers, from Philip Roth to Antonin Scalia to Jane Austen, How to Write a Sentence is much more than a writing manual—it is a spirited love letter to the written word, and a key to understanding how great writing works. It is a book that will stand the test of time.
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Excellent book for writers
- By missbizinla on 07-15-23
By: Stanley Fish
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Rationality
- What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 21st century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for COVID-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing? Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are an irrational species - cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions.
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Steven Pinker's Frozen Worldview from the 90s
- By Ryan Booth on 11-12-21
By: Steven Pinker
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Stein on Writing
- A Master Editor Shares His Craft, Techniques, and Strategies
- By: Sol Stein
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Stein on Writing provides immediately useful advice for writers of fiction and nonfiction, whether newcomers or accomplished professionals. As Sol Stein, renowned editor, author, and instructor, explains, "This is not a book of theory. It is a book of usable solutions, how to fix writing that is flawed, how to improve writing that is good, how to create interesting writing in the first place."
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Excellent advice and examples for better writing.
- By Jane on 06-22-12
By: Sol Stein
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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
- The Untold History of English
- By: John McWhorter
- Narrated by: John McWhorter
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar. Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.
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Great for casual linguists
- By Bertie on 01-11-10
By: John McWhorter
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Dreyer's English
- An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
- By: Benjamin Dreyer
- Narrated by: Benjamin Dreyer, Alison Fraser
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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As Random House’s copy chief, Dreyer has upheld the standards of the legendary publisher for more than two decades. He is beloved by authors and editors alike - not to mention his followers on social media - for deconstructing the English language with playful erudition. Now, he distills everything he has learned from the myriad books he has copyedited and overseen into a useful guide not just for writers but for everyone who wants to put their best prose foot forward.
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You'll be horrified at a lifetime of usage errors.
- By RTaylor on 05-16-19
By: Benjamin Dreyer
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Think with Pinker
- How to Be a Better Critical Thinker
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Steven Pinker, Various, Tim Harford, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
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Cognitive scientist Professor Steven Pinker has spent his life thinking about thinking, and now he wants us to join him. With the aid of his critical thinking toolkit, he hopes to help us make smarter choices, become more rational, gain a greater understanding of the confused world we live in—and maybe even become better citizens. In this fascinating series, produced in partnership with the Open University, he examines the different ways the human brain can be tripped up, from understanding probability to the difference between correlation and causation.
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not all pinkerton works are created equally
- By Dick Grayson on 06-01-24
By: Steven Pinker
Great audio book! Will be listening to it again.
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great read, great advice
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Great book, but a bit too complex for listening
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Defence against Grammar Nazis
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A good addition to a writer's collection
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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.
Common sense approach that changed my mind
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A stylish read
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A well-researched, beautifully written guide.
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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.
Pinker + Morey = Win!
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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.
More suitable as a regular book
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