Reddit Reddit reviews The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

We found 8 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.

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The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
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8 Reddit comments about The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century:

u/nlahnlah · 27 pointsr/slatestarcodex

I'm quite sympathetic to the argument that the Rationalist community often behaves in worryingly irrational ways, extending in-group status to Neoreactionaries being a prime example...

But damn, son; go pick up a copy of Pinker's Sense of Style, or Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Even a quick read through Scott's recent post on nonfiction writing will be of enormous benefit to you.

You vacillate wildly in tone between "snarky Youtube comment" and "dry, academic college essay", your paragraphs are bloated with cliches and banalities like "But if I might be so bold as to suggest" or "But there’s another angle that must be considered" (a quick read of some Orwell might cure you of this) and you resort to unimaginative insults like "vicious little shit" and "banal edgelords". Insults in general are usually a bad idea in an actual published work, but if you're gonna use them at least put a little creativity into them.


I've spent the last couple days in bed with a cold and I've been filling the hours by reading Reddit comments. An excerpt from an upcoming book should not be the worst prose I've seen in that time.

u/ASnugglyBear · 4 pointsr/booksuggestions

If you wish to write with sophistication, or with a plainspoken, bulleted style, there are books on that.

If you want something more general purpose, there is this

u/sansordhinn · 3 pointsr/AskReddit

Or not. All of its advice is either vacuous or ignorant, and not even the authors follow their own arbitrary, petty, uninformed rules. Instead, read a guide by someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

u/lostan · 2 pointsr/writing
u/reassemblethesocial · 2 pointsr/AskLiteraryStudies

A few more come to mind, less literature but more about stylistic and analytic skills you'll require in your advanced years in the Humanities.

People say to read a good style guide like Strunk & White, which is just okay. But I'd highly recommend Pinker's A Sense of Style--he also unpacks some of the problems with Strunk & White's core edicts.

Stanley Fish is just a great person to read in general. From his op-ed stuff in the NY Times to his class How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. I'd also highly recommend reading the full introduction of the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism or the introduction to Rifkin & Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology. When it comes to the lit theory stuff there are some good torrents with a lot of anthologies and canonical texts lumped together as PDFs. I also find a lot of good stuff with my Scribd membership.



u/devilsadvocado · 1 pointr/writing

I've been writing on and off for the past 12 years, and I'm not sure I have even one piece worth sharing. I struggle with voice and syntax, like everyone.

You might find this style guide helpful. It's one of the better writer helpers I've come across.

u/MR_ZORRR · 1 pointr/Clojure

Thanks, nice article!


I'd like to point out jonase/kibit for brevity concerns. Figuring out the brief form of a long expression is as much a matter of skill than a matter of taste in my opinion. For those of us that are lacking in any of those departments, automation brings a limited answer.


 


Also, since there's a dinoZORRR in the room (Strunk and White), allow me to recommend The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker, the best english style guide I've ever read.

u/A_Man_Has_No_Name · 1 pointr/AskLiteraryStudies

Aristotle's Poetics is where my literary criticism course started. You might also look at Longinus' On The Sublime and Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. If you want to get more specific on mechanics of pleasant writing that isn't so philosophically dense, you might look at Strunk & White's Elements of Style, Pinker's Sense of Style and my personal favorite, Stephen King's On Writing (The first half is biographical but the second part is an interesting commentary on the act of writing).