steven pinker
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Greatest Hits of the Heart
Patience. Curiosity. Repetition. Looking again and again. Not imposing a story line. Letting composition emerge through pattern, rhythm, shape, sound, movement. Occasionally … you hit upon a moment of grace. You can’t plan for it. You just have to practice…
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Stephen Pinker, Deplorer of the Dangling Modifier
After having written 800 pages on torture, rape, world war, and genocide, it was time to take on some really controversial topics like fused participles, dangling modifiers, and the serial comma. Over at the Guardian, Steven Pinker defends his choice to…
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The Rules are There
In his new book The Sense of Style, brain scientist Steven Pinker calls for a relaxation of English grammar rules. While the Daily Beast’s review praises Pinker for rejecting the false dichotomy between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, the New Yorker…
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Grammar As You Like It
Everybody has that one friend who insists they know good grammar. They’re probably wrong—Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker insists strict rules just don’t matter because language is fluid. Mother Jones explains the grammatically anti-authoritarian position: …language is never set in…
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“Clumsy, Obscure, Unpleasant to Read”
At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, wonders why so much academic writing is—well—bad.
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Books as Fetish Objects
Unpacking My Library introduces a new sub-genre to coffee table books: library porn.