Steven Pinker addresses ‘bad’ writing

Reading time: Just over 1 minute

This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a new book written by the scholar Steven Pinker. 

I read and enjoyed Steven Pinker’s 2003 book How The Mind Works several years ago. An MIT cognitive scientist, Pinker is smart, fun and incredibly incisive. I like the way his brain works. And I’ve always especially enjoyed reading books about the brain.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered that Pinker (pictured above) has recently turned his fastidious attention to how we write. His new style guide — aimed squarely at the academic market — is The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

While I haven’t yet read the book, it’s now #1 on my shopping list, thanks to a NYMag.com interview with him headlined, “Steven Pinker on Why It’s Okay to Dangle Your Participle.” Read this article if you want to understand his approach to language.

For example, he thoroughly won me over with his defense of the word ain’t. Here’s what he said:

Ain’t had the bad luck of not being spoken by the upper classes in London, so it was stigmatized as coarse, ungrammatical, incorrect, and so on, even though on its merits there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it even has some nice properties, namely it doesn’t have that ugly sibilant and is a single syllable. And that’s why ain’t, even though of course no one uses it in formal writing, is alive and well in other contexts, one of them being the lyrics of popular songs. “Ain’t she sweet,” or “it ain’t necessarily so.” Just try substituting isn’t or hasn’t into any of those lyrics and you can see why a lyricist would always go with ain’t over isn’t, which is just ugly.

Scholars who argue for the beauty of language over the correctness of it always win my heart.

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