Interesting thoughts on writing from Steven Pinker, who, in lamenting the “robotic” adherence to style manuals, says, “…if you follow the guideline, ‘Change every passive sentence into an active sentence,’ you don’t improve the prose, because there’s no way the passive construction could have survived in the English language for millennia if it hadn’t served some purpose.”
Good point.
He goes on to say that “the first step to being a good writer is to be a good reader: to read a lot, and to savor and reverse-engineer good prose wherever you find it.” Amen, brother.
It’s a 37-minute video, but (mercifully) there’s a transcription.
