William Strunk

Three red wheelbarrows leaning against the wall of a house.

Concretizing the enemy

ByAlex Chertok

Words have always coveted pictures for how immediately they can stir us. I think of the photograph of the South Vietnamese child who’d been sprayed by napalm. No word alive can match it. It was the photo on the cover of every magazine in 1972, which “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against…

The Evolution of the Style Guide: An Interview with Psycholinguist Steven Pinker

The Evolution of the Style Guide: An Interview with Psycholinguist Steven Pinker

ByBrett Beasley

  Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist and psychologist whose work focuses on language–how it works and how it breaks down. Drawing upon his nearly forty years of research, as well as his experiences on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, Pinker has developed a new guide to writing good prose called The…