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Book review: The Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker

If you want to start an argument online, make an assertion about English usage: "Apostrophes are on their way out", or "People who misuse apostrophes deserve to be guillotined".

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If you want to start an argument online, make an assertion about English usage: "Apostrophes are on their way out", or "People who misuse apostrophes deserve to be guillotined". For extra spice, add a dash of what's commonly considered solecism: "People who fret about apostrophes are, like, literally the worst thing in the world."

This gambit, of course, also works beyond cyberspace. On the page, and in conversation, we frequently observe that one person's idea of linguistic rectitude is another's of insufferable fussiness.

In , Steven Pinker cheerfully launches himself on to this terrain. The Harvard psychology professor is a rigorous thinker whose previous books, including and , have been distinguished by a flair for making highly technical subjects seem not just accessible but positively jaunty.

Now his distaste for the deathly edicts that glut most current volumes on literary style has led him to create what he calls "a writing guide for the 21st century".

The book has two parts: in the first, Pinker identifies the techniques that make prose compelling and the bad habits that can make it soggy, and in the second he focuses on contentious points of usage, of the sort addressed by American humorist Calvin Trillin's quip: "'Whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler."

Pinker's chosen field is crowded. There are plenty of books packed with trenchant ideas about the craft of writing prose. In Britain, a special reverence has long been reserved for Henry Watson Fowler's (1926), which urges writers to be "direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid".

In America, the most influential book of this kind is . Written in 1918 by William Strunk, it was revised in the 1950s by his former pupil E.B. White - hence the practice of calling it "Strunk and White".

The history of ideas about style doesn't detain Pinker for long, and he professes himself unable to supplant Strunk and White, but he is explicit about wanting to improve on the eccentricity and inconsistency of . He points out that Strunk was born in 1869; in the digital age, we may baulk at taking instruction from someone who formed his doctrine of English usage before the invention of the telephone.

What's more, there are many supposedly modern guides to good writing that are far less cogent than . Their authors are the sort of people who exult in claiming that the true sense of a particular word ("presently" as a synonym for "soon") is being driven out by a debased alternative ("presently" as a synonym for "now"). At their most belligerent, they will boycott a supermarket where the sign at the express checkout reads "Ten items or less", and will allege that the failure to distinguish between "less" and "fewer" is a symptom of grave social decline.

Pinker scrutinises these pedants' peeves. With a mixture of careful argument and finely tuned derision, he debunks a lot of creaky old hokum about the heinousness of splitting an infinitive and why you should write "Karen is smarter than I" rather than "Karen is smarter than me". Yet he is hardly a member of the "anything goes" school, and he lays down plenty of prescriptions about both the general character of well-wrought prose and its minutiae.

Pinker is a witty and personable guide. A strength of his writing is the shrewdly chosen example. As an instance of an ambiguous news headline he offers "Manufacturing data helps invigorate Wall Street", and his samples of risibly inept metaphor include "No one has yet invented a condom that will knock people's socks off".

He also grasps the need to engage the interest of readers for whom the word "wireless" doesn't call to mind a radio, although not everyone will cherish his descriptions of language as "a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers" and grammar as "the original sharing app".

Pinker is most persuasive when he provides examples of especially skilful writing and anatomises its virtues. "A coherent text is a designed object," he argues, and he shows contemporary writers such as obituarist Margalit Fox in the act of accommodating the different demands of clarity, accuracy, concision, tone and cadence.

This is a thoughtful guide, tough-minded and up to date, for people who think they can write well but are willing to believe that they could write better.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Guide to good writing entertains while it informs
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