Buy the Book: Review of The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
Last year, Steven Pinker made me cry. Again. The previous time was in 1994 when I read his first popular book, The Language Instinct. I had dreamed of writing a book about reasoning for a broad audience, but Pinker’s book was so rich and beautiful that I knew I could never write something as worthy of our field. The provocation for crying in 2014 was Pinker’s newest book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Persons Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. The reason for crying this time, however, was quite different. Since I became editor in 2010, every article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science has gone through two types of review: a scientific review and a writing review. The latter task, performed by my editorial team and me, has not always been either easy or pleasant—not for the authors and not for us. In a fantasy, I imagine that rather than sending authors pages of comments about the writing, I could have simply told them to buy, read, and use Pinker’s book.