Steven Pinker’s book The Sense of Style is not just a book about grammar and how to write well, but it’s actually written very well itself. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
But it’s instructive to see just how many words you’d expect to be extremely common really are not. That certainly isn’t a practical way to write, whether academic papers or blog postings. Munroe has also created a clever little web app that will flag words not on the list of one thousand most common. So much bad academic writing describes things as what they are, but never explains what they are actually good for and why anybody should care. Take a look at Up Goer Five and note how he describes the different parts of the rocket: not what they are, but what they do. But the beauty of Thing Explainer goes beyond that. The small vocabulary used means no jargon, no difficult or unusual words at all. The explanations are by no means simplistic though, and the drawings are very clever and contain lots of little in-jokes. He limits himself to the “ten hundred” most common words in English (the word “thousand” did not make the list) to do that.
In Thing Explainer, he uses his signature style to explain machines and processes in simple drawings and words. Munroe is the guy behind the xkcd web comic. Randall Munroe, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Terms Here are two books every academic should read and take to heart to be able to recognize bad prose and learn how to fix it. Bad writing and the inability to explain in terms normal people can understand are the hallmarks of academic writing.
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