Science behind good writing
EVERY generation believes “that kids today are degrading the language and taking civilisation down with it”. This can be traced all the way back to ancient Sumerian clay tablets, some of which “include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young”. Yet in Stephen Pinker’s opinion it is the professionals and not the “tweeting teenagers” whose work is frequently unreadable. Peruse a legal document or one of the more obfuscating examples of academic writing out there and one might readily agree.
Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary — a body at once obscure and intimately concerned with how language is used in everyday life — Pinker is a Harvard scholar specialising in psycholinguistics, that being the psychological and neurobiological factors which enable the acquisition, use, and comprehension of language. He is probably best known beyond the academy for The Language of Instinct (1994) and The Stuff of Thought (2007) volumes which, like The Sense of Style, attempt to demystify dry technicalities for the general reader.
