“Writing guides tend to be pretty unsatisfying. They offer plenty of concrete rules, but why, a reader might ask, should the rules be followed? The answer is usually “because” — as in, “because I say so.” This, of course, is where humanity found itself before the advent of the scientific method: the mystics spoke, and everyone had to decide for themselves whom to believe. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker takes a different approach, one that is both more ambitious and more modest. In his new book, “The Sense of Style,” he draws on research, and particularly his deep knowledge of linguistics, to give his writing principles a scientific basis. Readers can thus have some assurance that Pinker’s advice is good, and, knowing the reasons why, they will be more likely to know when a rule should be broken. Yet he does not push this method beyond its natural limits. Scientists, after all, still know relatively little about the ways dark squiggles communicate ideas. Instead, he shows readers how to take apart a piece of fine writing to see what makes it tick.” • #схватил_за_мозг ∙ #как_писать_слова - × × ×

“Text that has a lot of local ambiguities is frustrating to read, because it constantly forces the reader to backtrack and reinterpret. One of the things that differentiates “smooth” from “choppy” prose is the absence of these dead ends. The authors of traditional style guides, like Strunk and White, were dimly aware of the problem, but lacked the technical concepts to analyze it, and offered useless advice such as “Keep related words together.” The advice is useless for the Yale sentence, the related words panel and on sex in fact are already together; disambiguating it requires moving related words apart to get a panel with four professors on sex. For that matter, if it had been a panel on drugs with four professors, then the word-moving solution would make things worse: a panel with four professors on drugs is just as misleading as the panel on sex with four professors.” - × × ×