Reddit reviews The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
We found 11 Reddit comments about The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
> I think too often the linguistic community ignores prescriptivism as a meaningful social construct
Linguists don't ignore prescriptivism; they reject it as being unscientific. Much of what prescriptivists claim we ought to say or write doesn't stand up to scrutiny in the face of the linguistic evidence. That's the point.
It's not true to say that if you a descriptivist, you can't advocate for using formal language in an essay, or advise people on how to deliver a presidential speech. You just do it from an informed scientific point of view. For example, Steven Pinker, linguist and cognitive psychologist, wrote a style guide a few years ago as a modern descriptive alternative to Strunk and White et al.
On Strunk and White, this podcast episode by John McWhorter (Against Strunk and White) will give you more insight into the folly of prescriptivism. Well worth listening to.
> I am Rollo Tomassi now. Don’t worry, I’m not legally changing my name. At first it was a clever online handle for me, and my real name is so white-bread generic it almost serves as a form of anonymity. Now it is me, and I’m okay with that.
It's funny to imagine you have another, real name. I can't imagine you as M. Steve Smith or a Thomas Anderson.
Happy to hear you'll be focusing more and more on helping men in this decaying society. I recently heard of a friend of a friend trying to commit suicide, following a nasty divorce, as per usual now. It made my blood boil to think that I have in my possession the (free) cure to that widespread mental illness that is modern men's unhappiness, and to not be able to give it away easily.
I humbly recommend Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style" as a resource to keep improving your writing. It's not that you don't write well; Only that self-improvement never ends.
Happy birthday old man. And thank you again for your insanely positive influence in my life.
While I'm all for open access to learning, I feel a little hesitant sharing my class notes on the internet without the instructor's permission. However, Steven Pinker's book, The Sense of Style, shares a lot of the same information and is also excellent.
https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799
Combine Steven Pinker's Sense of Style and The Little, Brown Handbook, and you'll be set.
> infixing is also a thing and it's fan-fucking-tastic.
Note that fuck is a very special word. It's the only one we can insert into other words in the way you did. It's in-fucking-credible.
Am I missing any other words that we do this with?
P.S. I remember seeing a good video about this. But, searching for fuck in videos is unlikely to turn up the one I'm thinking of. BTW, it's also OK to end a sentence with a preposition. Else you end up with sentences like this:
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which we shall not put.
Have you read Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century"? You sound like someone who might enjoy it.
It's not suffering, it's evolving. Language is and always has been dynamic.
Check out the opening to this book. Steven Pinker: The Sense of Style
A word of caution: while /u/ProbableWalrus has succeeded in making your first few paragraphs more interesting, his version is still error-ridden. You'll need a solid understanding of grammar and punctuation if you want to get published.
I think Martha Kolln's Rhetorical Grammar would help you tremendously. It provides a thorough-but-accessible overview of modern phrase-structure grammar, favoring critical, rhetorical decision-making over rote memorization. If you're interested in something more advanced, Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style is also wonderful. Pinker is on the cutting edge of modern linguistics.
Here are a few I think are good:
Getting Started
On Writing: This book is great. There are a lot of nice principles you can walk away with and a lot of people on this subreddit agree it's a great starting point!
Lots of Fiction: Nothing beats just reading a lot of good fiction, especially in other genres. It helps you explore how the greats do it and maybe pick up a few tricks along the way.
For Editing
Self-Editing For Fiction Writers: there isn't anything in here that will blow your writing away, land you an agent, and secure a NYT bestseller, but it has a lot of good, practical things to keep an eye out for in your writing. It's a good starting place for when you are learning to love writing (which is mostly rewriting)
A Sense of Style by Steve Pinker: I really loved this book! It isn't exclusively about fiction, but it deals with the importance of clarity in anything that is written.
Garner's Modern American Usage: I just got this about a month ago and have wondered what I was doing before. This is my resource now for when I would normally have gone to Google and typed a question about grammar or usage or a word that I wasn't sure I was using correctly. It's a dictionary, but instead of only words, it is filled with essays and entries about everything a serious word-nut could spend the rest of their^1 life reading.
^1 ^Things ^such ^as ^the ^singular ^their ^vs ^his/hers
Publishing
Writer's Market 2016: There are too many different resources a writer can use to get published, but Writer's Market has a listing for Agents, publishers, magazines, journals, and contests. I think it's a good start once you find your work ready and polished.
There are too many books out there that I haven't read and have heard good things about as well. They will probably be mentioned above in this thread.
Another resource I have learned the most from are books I think are terrible. It allows you to read something, see that it doesn't work, and makes you process exactly what the author did wrong. You can find plenty of bad fiction if you look hard enough! I hope some of this helps!
I'm reading Pinker's book now and as somebody who works with scientists and engineers, really liked this section. We have this in spades. There's a lot on the web about it, but it might not hurt to buy the book.
I'm pretty partial to Stephen Pinker. He has a very accessible writing style: http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1464980131&sr=8-2&keywords=stephen+pinker
Actually I literally poured it down a drain last time since I had to do it in a parking lot and it was too much water to put on the ground without causing a mini-river. And also, maybe check out Pinker's guide to style. You can get a copy here:https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799
In it, you will learn that texts, internet comments, and tweets are commonly referenced using the "said" indicator, something that most mainstream news sites do too.
So congrats, you played yourself.