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The Sense of StyleBook

by Steven Pinker

Who uses, recommends or left The Sense of Style, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

2 people

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and emeritus professor at Yale; author of books on morality, pleasure and empathy, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
loved

Steven Pinker goes deep, showing how understanding the science of memory, social understanding, and syntactic structure can really pay off in making one a better writer.

His list of the four books about writing he calls his favourites, on his Small Potatoes newsletter.

2024-05-13·smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net ↗

Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation; keeps a public log of every book he reads at tylercipriani.com.
liked

Overall, I'm still firmly on team Strunk and White. But this was a pretty damned entertaining grammar book.

One of the star-rated reviews in his public reading log for 2022. He rates it 4/5.

2022-06-07·tylercipriani.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.