The author might not like Pinker's writing, but this hardly speaks against Pinker's advice. I have a feeling he read the first chapter of The Sense of Style and

The author might not like Pinker's writing, but this hardly speaks against Pinker's advice. I have a feeling he read the first chapter of The Sense of Style and decided the whole thing is bullshit because it's about style and not substance. But the author clearly accepts the need for some level of style. The blog theme they use has a readable column-width, a table of contents, etc. And the advice they give fits with Pinker's. For example, "Rich outlines" is relevant to chapter 5 of Pinker, "Arcs of Coherence." > I want to get some information from them and I want to get examples and counterexamples for the points they make. I want them to get to the point. Pinker's book is fairly dense on the advice front, and chock full of examples. Including ones about academic writing that involve shorter sentences and more clarity, like rewording "Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word" into "We presented participants with a sentence, followed by the word 'true' or 'false'." > The first advice you need to give to an academic writer is not to read a book on stylish writing but rather to read how people in their field are writing. Because those are their potential readers.... Sure, but they don't have to be the only readers, and jargon and bad style make a community insular. And beside, even for those readers, the point (particularly beyond chapter 1) is that conveying meaning efficiently requires sound structure. One gets the feeling that the author likes jargon and density for its own sake, or because it makes the author feel like a member of the community. They seem to assume that better-styled writing will necessarily be less scrupulous: > clear explicit structure and moderately shorter sentences. No stories, no metaphors, no flourishes. No avoidance of passives or reduction of adverbs. No worries about technical language. Just these two. They will not only make the academic writing easier to read, they will also make it more scrupulous. Okay, maybe stories aren't appropriate in academic papers, nor inexact metaphors, but so what? That's not a matter of style. And why just these two? Would the author's thesis be better stated as "worry about structure and concision first"? Because I don't think Pinker's book would disagree with that.