Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 350

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century," by Steven Pinker.

For many reasons, manuals that are credulous about the inerrancy of the traditional rules don’t serve writers well. Although some of the rules can make prose better, many of them make it worse, and writers are better off flouting them. The rules often mash together issues of grammatical correctness, logical coherence, formal style, and standard dialect, but a skilled writer needs to keep them straight. And the orthodox stylebooks are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.

Syntax, then, is an app that uses a tree of phrases to translate a web of thoughts into a string of words.