When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.
Steven PinkerThe last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.
Steven Pinker... people notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning.
Steven PinkerWriters acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
Steven PinkerThe brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
Steven Pinker