It was one of 20 minutes gaps between appointments, and of course I spent the time in a bookshop. I escaped with just one paperback, Steven Pinker’s [amazon_link id=”0241957710″ target=”_blank” ]The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century[/amazon_link]. To be honest, it was the cover image that sold it to me: I’m a sucker for monochrome photographs.

[amazon_image id=”0241957710″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century[/amazon_image]

Normally I don’t read how-to-write books. After all, I’ve been writing for aeons: school essays, 2 essays a week at university, a PhD dissertation (economics, but still, it had words), policy notes, client reports, magazine and newspaper articles, books. Just recently, though, I’ve read two excellent ones (the other being Oliver Kamm’s [amazon_link id=”0297871935″ target=”_blank” ]Accidence Will Happen[/amazon_link]).

[amazon_image id=”0297871935″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage[/amazon_image]

Pinker’s book is of course written with even more than his usual clarity and elegance. He makes it quite funny, too. The aspect I found most useful was the advice on writing to accommodate how our brains process language. This pertains to sentence structure, and also to the structure of longer pieces of text. Structure is absolutely the hardest aspect of any long piece of writing – the longer, the harder. This is because thinking is hard too. Clarity of thought and clarity of writing are strongly positively correlated.

[amazon_link id=”0241957710″ target=”_blank” ]The Sense of Style[/amazon_link] also has a long final section which runs through the usual questions: when to use ‘I’ or ‘me’; can you put prepositions at the end of sentences or start with a ‘but’ or ‘and’? I enjoyed the advice about the subjunctive mood because I had never known the difference between that and the use of ‘were’ (“If I were a rich man, dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah di dah…”), the latter being in fact called ‘irrealis’. If that doesn’t entice you to buy the book, nothing will.