What is Reddit's opinion of The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The good news is that academic writing, in general, sucks, so it won't take you much work to write better than most (source: PhD student who has had to suffer through lots of atrocious papers and talks). Hell, stop using the passive voice and you're already in the top 10%.

Whatever you do, never ever ever try to impress your reader by making things more complicated than they have to be. No one has ever read a paper, attended a talk, or sat through a lecture and though 'gosh, I wish this was less accessible'. The things you should strive for in academic writing are clarity and narrative flow. A good writer makes difficult ideas seem effortless. A bad writer makes simple ideas seem complicated.

The highest compliment you can give in my field is to call someone's work elegant, which in this context means 'gracefully concise and simple'. Strive for elegance.

If you want a good guide for academic writing, I can't recommend Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style enough. It's fantastic. Buy it right now. No, seriously, here's an amazon link.

For writing, I strongly recommend you start with Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

I read it after I struggled with a paper I was writting, and the results were so interweaved that I had a hard time explaining them coherently. That hurt the paper a lot, and I knew it, but could not fix it. So I was primed to read it, and was not disapointed: it helped me beyond measure.

> I think too often the linguistic community ignores prescriptivism as a meaningful social construct

Linguists don't ignore prescriptivism; they reject it as being unscientific. Much of what prescriptivists claim we ought to say or write doesn't stand up to scrutiny in the face of the linguistic evidence. That's the point.

It's not true to say that if you a descriptivist, you can't advocate for using formal language in an essay, or advise people on how to deliver a presidential speech. You just do it from an informed scientific point of view. For example, Steven Pinker, linguist and cognitive psychologist, wrote a style guide a few years ago as a modern descriptive alternative to Strunk and White et al.

On Strunk and White, this podcast episode by John McWhorter (Against Strunk and White) will give you more insight into the folly of prescriptivism. Well worth listening to.

It might surprise you to find out there are quite a few skills and experiences that aren't regularly included in a resume!

I know it seems like a benign and banal edition to the interview process, but there are experiences that don't translate well on resumes alone.

Like I got used to using our company's internal wiki space, which was Moinmoin; we later moved to Atlassian Confluence due to plugin features that were desirable. During that time, I had to learn how to simple script out the wiki markdown syntax changes between the two types of wikis, and then had to figure out methods of better organizing our product's internal wiki space so that information was easier to find. That led to me coming up with new documentation standards (bolding text, use monospace for variables/output, color text RED when bad, color text blue when it's a term that should be memorized, warnings in orange, etc) that I ended up using, which led to other people in the company using, which led to easier to read documentation.

I also learned that using conversational writing tone is better for memorizing knowledge, if you can tell it in a semi-story, do so (because we humans remember things temporally, which is why stories work so well for us learning new knowledge).

If I were to put those accomplishments/experiences on a resume, it'd show up as:

• facilitated migration of wiki space to confluence wiki while also helping to create new standards.

It doesn't do the experiences justice.

Now, granted, you're just starting out in the technical writing, and you've probably got a healthy case of imposter syndrome... but trust me when I say there are skills and experiences that you can share with a recruiter that will show them "yes i have more to learn, but i have a good foundation already".

Also, use tables for step-driven processes; it helps cut down on bullet points for each step ;)

GOOD LUCK!

I highly recommend Why Academics Stink at Writing by Steven Pinker. And if you like that, check out his book The Sense of Style. I found it much better than the other style guides as it gives the reasoning behind many usage decisions. For example, he doesn't recklessly discard the passive voice like Strunk and White does. Don't say "the man fed the dog" if "the man" is not relevant. Rather, if the dog is what's important, use the passive: "the dog was fed."

I'm pretty partial to Stephen Pinker. He has a very accessible writing style: http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1464980131&sr=8-2&keywords=stephen+pinker

Actually I literally poured it down a drain last time since I had to do it in a parking lot and it was too much water to put on the ground without causing a mini-river. And also, maybe check out Pinker's guide to style. You can get a copy here:https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799

In it, you will learn that texts, internet comments, and tweets are commonly referenced using the "said" indicator, something that most mainstream news sites do too.

So congrats, you played yourself.