Grammar Puss: Pinker's Such a Stinker?

In Grammar Puss, by Steve Pinker, the essay finally annihilates all those hypersensitive grammarians that are more concerned with exposing the weaknesses of others than improving language as a whole. The essay begins with the science of language and ends with the real purpose of improving language is "the clarity and style of written prose" (10). But the most interesting part was "Good writers go through anywhere from two to twenty drafts before releasing a paper" (11). As a person that is notorious in avoiding revisions, Pinker reminds the reader that the brain was not engineered to express complex trains of thought on paper. This is why writing is so difficult and explains why revisions are so prudent. The gist of his essay was to explain why "many prescriptive rules are just plain dumb..." (10) and that people should employ the standard english used in their dialect or what Foster would call discourse community. So, while Pinker does feel that tradition and rules are antiquated, he does feel that we must learn how to communicate with what is vogue in language communities.