The Thinking Person'sGuide to Writingin the 21st Centurywith Steven Pinker
Hosted by The Ottawa Citizen's Kate Heartfield
In Person Big Ideas
Admission
Free
Sunday
Oct , 2014
26
6:30pm
Eastern
Knox Presbyterian Church
120 Lisgar Street (at Elgin) • Ottawa
Forget Strunk and White’s rules—cognitive science is a surer basis for clear and cogent writing, according to this iconoclastic guide from bestselling Harvard psycholinguist Pinker... Every writer can profit from—and every writer can enjoy—Pinker’s analysis of the ways in which skillfully chosen words engage the mind.
Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?
In The Sense of Style, bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent and stylish prose.
Join us for examples of great and gruesome prose and a conversation on how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.
