纽时畅销作家、《语言本能》作者
享誉国际的认知科学 ╳ 心理语言学家
结合科学家的洞见及语法的新发展
传授你写好文章的艺术
为什么那么多文章如此糟糕，该怎样改善？
英语正因为短讯和社交媒体而变坏吗？
今天的孩子还会注重良好的写作吗？
那我们任何人为什么还要注重它？
在这本有趣而富启迪意义的书里，认知科学家、语言学家暨畅销书作者史蒂芬 平克重新构思了一部二十一世纪的语文用法指南。他没有慨叹语言的堕落，没有在一些恼人的语言问题上吹毛求疵，也没有把一个世纪前语文指南中的可疑规则照录如仪，取而代之，他把语言和心智科学的洞见应用到富挑战性的任务上：如何打造清晰、具一致性而别具风格的文章。
他说，不要把问题归咎于网路或今天的小孩；良好写作从来是艰难的任务。他从品味别人的好文章起步。他要让想象力发挥作用：营造一种幻觉，彷佛把读者的目光引导到世间的事物。作者必须克服知识的诅咒——这种障碍令我们难以想象别人对我们所认知的如何毫无概念。熟练的作者必须能敏锐觉察句法如何把纠结不清的意念转化为直线式句子。他们还必须把文章编织成具一致性的整体，流畅地一句一句接续下去。还有，他们要懂得拿捏正确的语文用法，把有助文章变得清晰和优雅的规则跟迷思和迷信区别开来。
书中从现代文章中撷取了大量正面和反面例子，避免了古典风格手册的责备语气和武断口吻，揭示写作艺术是掌握一种本领的愉悦经验，也是令人着迷的智性活动。《写作风格的意识》适合各种各样的作者，它的读者对象，则包括对文艺或文学有兴趣，而希望了解心智科学如何能发挥妙用让我们瞥见语言怎样运作。
What is the secret of good prose? Does writing well even matter in an age of instant communication? Should we care? In this funny, thoughtful book about the modern art of writing, Steven Pinker shows us why we all need a sense of style.
More than ever before, the currency of our social and cultural lives is the written word, from Twitter and texting to blogs, e-readers and old-fashioned books. But most style guides fail to prepare people for the challenges of writing in the 21st century, portraying it as a minefield of grievous errors rather than a form of pleasurable mastery. They fail to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time, adapted by millions of writers and speakers to their needs. Confusing changes in the world with moral decline, every generation believes the kids today are degrading society and taking language with it. A guide for the new millennium, writes Steven Pinker, has to be different.
Drawing on the latest research in linguistics and cognitive science, Steven Pinker replaces the recycled dogma of previous style guides with reason and evidence. This thinking person’s guide to good writing shows why style still matters: in communicating effectively, in enhancing the spread of ideas, in earning a reader’s trust and, not least, in adding beauty to the world. Eye-opening, mind-expanding and cheerful, The Sense of Style shows that good style is part of what it means to be human.
纽时畅销作家、Language Instinct《语言本能》作者
享誉国际的认知科学 ╳ 心理语言学家
为21世纪知识分子所写的英语写作指南
良好的写作并非本能，对人类来说，这甚至是项艰难的任务；然而，这不代表我们无法透过后天努力掌握这项技艺，更不代表学习过程必然枯燥而充满教条；事实上，这可以是一场迷人的心智旅程。
The Sense of Style《写作风格的意识》是为了有英文写作的需求，并期望提升此项能力的人们而撰。此外，如果对文学有兴趣，或希望了解心智科学如何帮助人们理解语言的运作，也能从本书获得启发。
搭配丰富的正反实例，作者告诉我们：
透过大量阅读提升品味和语感
让读者与文章主题产生清楚链接
去除专业知识构成的理解障碍
避免不恰当的文章结构误导读者
确保文章具一致性与逻辑性
掌握正确语法
掌握以上数点，并经过假以时日的练习，就能写出论述清晰而又兼具风格的英语好文章。
推荐理由：
1. 世界知名语言学家、TED演讲人、《语言本能》作者史蒂芬 平克新著作；
2. 引用大量优美的文章，说明如何能使文章好看且易于阅读；
3. 笔法及引用的例子特殊，市场相对少见；
4. 旁征博引，丰富的语言学、科学与心智科学知识，提供读者丰富多元的阅读厚度。
名家推荐：
“本书优雅而清晰地一击即中，推翻了所谓英语快烂得要丢去喂狗了的说法。平克为新世纪写了像史壮克和怀特(Strunk and White)那样的经典之作，同时劝导人们抛弃没有根据的无稽之谈，譬如指称那个广告老口号该说成：‘Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.’(云丝顿好味道，香烟就该这么好。)” ——约翰 麦克霍特(John McWhorter)(《伟哉！我们的杂种语言》(Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue)和《巴别塔的力量》(The Power of Babel)的作者)
“干得好！只有平克才能写出这本了不起的好书，也谢天谢地他真把它写了出来。他写道：“好文章能把我们对世界的观感翻转过来。”《写作风格的意识》一书也能把你对好文章的想法翻转过来。书中每一页都散发着平克的好奇之心和欣喜之情；而当他说，风格可以令世界变得更美好，我们都信以为真。” ——帕特里克 欧康纳(Patricia T. O’Conner)(《我何其不幸》(Woe Is I)的作者，并与史都华 凯勒曼(Stewart Kellerman)合着《似是而非的起源》(Origins of the Specious)
“能有像他那样活泼而澄明的心智，把认知科学的意念带给普罗大众，真是一桩好事。” ——德格拉斯 霍夫斯达德(Douglas Hofstadter《洛杉矶时报》)
“Charming and erudite,” from the author of the forthcoming Enlightenment Now (February 2018), “The wit and insight and clarity he brings… is what makes this book such a gem.” —Time.com
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—and why should we care? From the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and the forthcoming Enlightenment Now
In this entertaining and eminently practical book, the cognitive scientist, dictionary consultant, and New York Times-bestselling author Steven Pinker rethinks the usage guide for the twenty-first century. Using examples of great and gruesome modern prose while avoiding the scolding tone and Spartan tastes of the classic manuals, he shows how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right. The Sense of Style is for writers of all kinds, and for readers who are interested in letters and literature and are curious about the ways in which the sciences of mind can illuminate how language works at its best.
Review
Praise for The Sense of Style
“[The Sense of Style] is more contemporary and comprehensive than ‘The Elements of Style,’ illustrated with comic strips and cartoons and lots of examples of comically bad writing. [Pinker’s] voice is calm, reasonable, benign, and you can easily see why he’s one of Harvard’s most popular lecturers.”—The New York Times
“Pinker’s linguistical learning… is considerable. His knowledge of grammar is extensive and runs deep. He also takes a scarcely hidden delight in exploding tradition. He describes his own temperament as ‘both logical and rebellious.’ Few things give him more pleasure than popping the buttons off what he takes to be stuffed shirts.”—The Wall Street Journal
“[W]hile The Sense of Style is very much a practical guide to clear and compelling writing, it’s also far more…. In the end, Pinker’s formula for good writing is pretty basic: write clearly, try to follow the rules most of the time—but only the when they make sense. It’s neither rocket science nor brain surgery. But the wit and insight and clarity he brings to that simple formula is what makes this book such a gem.”—Time.com
“Erudite and witty… With its wealth of helpful information and its accessible approach, The Sense of Style is a worthy addition to even the most overburdened shelf of style manuals.”—Shelf Awareness
史蒂芬 平克 Steven Pinker是屡屡获奖的认知科学家和公共知识分子。他是《美国传统英语词典》(American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)用法小组主席，也是《语言本能》(The Language Instinct)、《词与规则》(Words and Rules)和《思维素材》(The Stuff of Thought)等书备受赞誉的作者。他是哈佛大学心理学系约翰斯东家族(Johnstone Family)讲座教授，现居波士顿和麻州特鲁罗市(Truro)。
平克曾获奖项包括：
皇家科学院亨利 戴尔奖(Henry Dale Prize, Royal Institution, 2004)
华特 凯斯勒书籍奖(Walter P. Kistler Book Award, 2005)
美国人道主义协会年度人道主义奖(Humanist of the Year award, issued by the AHA, 2006)
认知神经科学学会乔治 米勒奖(George Miller Prize, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2010)
理查 道金斯奖(Richard Dawkins Award, 2013)
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has been listed among Foreign Policy magazine’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” He is currently chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.
Prologue
Chapter 1 Good Writing
Chapter 2 A Window onto the World
Chapter 3 The Curse of Knowledge
Chapter 4 The Web, the Tree, and the String
Chapter 5 Arcs of Coherence
Chapter 6 Telling Right From Wrong
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
Prologue
I love style manuals. Ever since I was assigned Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in an introductory psychology course, the writing guide has been among my favorite literary genres. It’s not just that I welcome advice on the lifelong challenge of perfecting the craft of writing. It’s also that credible guidance on writing must itself be well written, and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice. William Strunk’s course notes on writing, which his student E. B. White turned into their famous little book, was studded with gems of self-exemplification such as “Write with nouns and verbs,” “Put the emphatic words of a sentence at the end,” and best of all, his prime directive, “Omit needless words.” Many eminent stylists have applied their gifts to explaining the art, including Kingsley Amis, Jacques Barzun, Ambrose Bierce, Bill Bryson, Robert Graves, Tracy Kidder, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, F. L. Lucas, George Orwell, William Safire, and of course White himself, the beloved author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Here is the great essayist reminiscing about his teacher:
I like to read style manuals for another reason, the one that sends botanists to the garden and chemists to the kitchen: it’s a practical application of our science. I am a psycholinguist and a cognitive scientist, and what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind? It’s all the more captivating to someone who seeks to explain these fields to a wide readership. I think about how language works so that I can best explain how language works.
But my professional acquaintance with language has led me to read the traditional manuals with a growing sense of unease. Strunk and White, for all their intuitive feel for style, had a tenuous grasp of grammar.2 They misdefined terms such as phrase, participle, and relative clause, and in steering their readers away from passive verbs and toward active transitive ones they botched their examples of both. There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground, for instance, is not in the passive voice, nor does The cock’s crow came with dawn contain a transitive verb. Lacking the tools to analyze language, they often struggled when turning their intuitions into advice, vainly appealing to the writer’s “ear.” And they did not seem to realize that some of the advice contradicted itself: “Many a tame sentence . . . can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice” uses the passive voice to warn against the passive voice. George Orwell, in his vaunted “Politics and the English Language,” fell into the same trap when, without irony, he derided prose in which “the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active.”
Self-contradiction aside, we now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory. A skilled writer should know what those functions are and push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naïve style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.
Style manuals that are innocent of linguistics also are crippled in dealing with the aspect of writing that evokes the most emotion: correct and incorrect usage. Many style manuals treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation. But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore and myth. For many reasons, manuals that are credulous about the inerrancy of the traditional rules don’t serve writers well. Although some of the rules can make prose better, many of them make it worse, and writers are better off flouting them. The rules often mash together issues of grammatical correctness, logical coherence, formal style, and standard dialect, but a skilled writer needs to keep them straight. And the orthodox stylebooks are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.
