Very Long Sentences in Fiction

Recently, I was listening to the audiobook of James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, and at some point it struck me that we’d been in the middle of a sentence for quite a while. But it wasn’t just long—it was lyrical and purposeful. Pretty early on in the sentence, I began to realize it wasn’t primarily about an annual infestation of ants.

Russell Harper on revising The Chicago Manual of Style

If you have ever submitted a question to our Chicago Manual of Style Q&A (and we encourage you to do so here), Russell Harper may have been one of the editors considering your question. Russell is especially qualified to answer CMOS questions thanks to his role as the principal reviser for the sixteenth edition. This means . . .

Steven Pinker talks about The Sense of Style

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. He is chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary and often writes for the New York Times, Time, and the New Republic. After years of research and numerous books on visual cognition and the psychology of language, he has now . . .