The Sense of Style

• author: Steven Pinker

Excepts

Good writing

A window onto the world

p.36
Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.

p.42
Another bad habit of self-conscious writing is the prissy use of quotation marks—someimtes called shudder quotes or scare quotes—to distance the writer from a common idiom:

… But this is not the “take home message.” …

… The authors seem to be saying, “I couldn’t think of a more dignified way of putting this, but please don’t think I’m a flibbertigibbet who talks this way; I really am a serious scholar.”