A review of The Sense of Style:
The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
(Authors: Steven Pinker)

There are two ideas in cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style that I believe are toweringly critical:

1) close empathy with the mental strivings of your audience, and
2) viewing explanation as building an image.

You might wonder why I am reviewing a book about better writing when our educational vision eschews text in favor of audiovisual. There are good books about designing multimedia for learning (an obvious one is Clark and Mayer’s [link] e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning.) I’ll say more about this later, but it’s partly inspired by my pleasure at seeing that the same aspects of cognition are central for both text and multimedia. And because Professor Pinker explains those cognitive aspects so well.