The Sense of Style

What Hacker News says

1. K0nservSep 2026
   I've been reading Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style". Unlike "The Elements of Style", which is fine, it does a good job anchoring its suggestion in first principals. I do think I need to read a book on grammar to truly appreciate it though.

   "On Writing" is another book like "The Elements of Style", both are too prescriptive, albeit not useless.

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2. bagatelleJan 2026
   I recently read "The Sense Of Style", which explained the actual principle behind making an understandable run-on. The trick was to allow the brain to mentally store away the earlier parts of the sentence, and take it out of the parsing context into the logical connections context. Not going to try and remake the point from scratch, if you're curious go read the book!

   (as a sidenote, trying to make a point about grammar made me very self-conscious about mine, this is why I had to read a good book!)

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3. lucasfcostaMay 2025
   Co-author and founder of Briefer here.

   I used to use em dashes before they were cool. I actually learned about them when I emailed a guy who's a software engineer at Genius and also writes for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

   I asked him for tips on how to write well and he recommended that I read Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style", which uses em dashes exhaustively, and explains when and why one should use them.

   It also pains me that I can't use them anymore or else people will think an AI did the writing.

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4. tinixMay 2025
   I also recommend "The Sense of Style"; knowing how to wield punctuation and grammatical structure is critical for clearly and successfully articulating your ideas. I use semicolons, colons, and parentheticals heavily (but en dashes and em dashes are great too).

   vs

   I also recommend "The Sense of Style"--knowing how to wield punctuation and grammatical structure is critical for clearly and successfully articulating your ideas--and I use semicolons, colons, and parentheticals heavily (but en dashes and em dashes are great too).

   I find that dashes are great for conversational style flowing sentence structure, but sometimes they can become too long and tiring to the reader.

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5. lewiscollardDec 2024
   If I may hijack your reply for a recommendation thread, I'd recommend "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker, too. It's worth it just for the section on metaconcepts. I loved how much simpler my writing became when I removed them.

   Also, read anything by Robert Graves. He did write a style guide called "The Reader Over Your Shoulder", but that's optional; I learned far more about good writing from "I, Claudius" and "Good-Bye to All That".

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6. Noumenon72Jul 2023
   Steven Pinker's _The Sense of Style_ is good at grounding style rules in the actual evolved structures of human grammar.

   I also recommend the left-to-right, "topic position -> stress position" approach described in https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-long-view/the-sci.... I care more about whether I am making the reader do unnecessary work than whether I am entertaining to read or whether my commas are spliced.

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