The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
Published 2014 · 370 pages · 95,629 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is The Sense of Style to read?
The Sense of Style scores 32 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 44 out of 100
- Pinker writes in accessible, contemporary prose but salts it with precise linguistic terminology — nominalization, coordinator, subordinator, genitive case, deep structure — defining each one as it appears. The vocabulary sits well below Melville's whaling jargon or Nabokov's wordplay; a general reader rarely needs a dictionary, though the grammatical apparatus adds a layer most readers haven't met since grade school.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Pinker practices the classic style he preaches: sentences are varied but controlled, favoring right-branching structure that front-loads the subject and saves complexity for the end. Long sentences appear — he quotes a 340-word specimen of his own approvingly — but they're built from short, self-contained clauses strung side by side rather than the deep center-embedding he warns readers against.
- Abstraction: 47 out of 100
- The book moves between syntax trees, cognitive-science concepts like chunking and the curse of knowledge, and real grammatical theory, all pitched at a level that demands sustained attention. But Pinker's guiding principle — explain abstraction as if it were a visible object — keeps every concept tethered to a concrete example, from an Oedipus-sentence diagram to a heron column from a Cape Cod newspaper.
- Information density: 57 out of 100
- Nearly every page carries a rule, a counter-example, a usage-panel statistic, or a labeled taxonomy of coherence relations, and the hundred-entry glossary of disputed words in chapter 6 reads like a reference manual compressed into prose. The density is offset by short digestible units — most points get a table, a bulleted contrast, or a one-line example — so it never approaches the unbroken density of an encyclopedic novel.
How The Sense of Style is regarded
The Sense of Style holds a literary regard score of 53 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.