The simplistic rule "Use the active voice", echoed by George Orwell in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", has proved especially tenacious. This slim volume abounds with precepts that are superficially pleasing but misguided and restrictive. Written in 1918 by William Strunk, it was revised in the 1950s by his former pupil EB White – hence the practice of calling it "Strunk and White". In America, the most influential book of this kind is The Elements of Style.
In Britain, a special reverence has long been reserved for Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage (1926), which urges writers to be "direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid". But the big beasts are manuals of an altogether more prescriptive nature. There are plenty of books packed with trenchant ideas about the craft of writing prose: I know people who swear by William Zinsser's On Writing Well, Joseph Williams's Style or Stephen King's On Writing. 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 the American humorist Calvin Trillin's quip: "'Whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler." 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 Harvard psychology professor is a rigorous thinker whose previous books, including The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought, have been distinguished by a flair for making highly technical subjects seem not just accessible but positively jaunty. In The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker cheerfully launches himself on to this terrain.
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