April 24, 2009, 6:25 pm
Happy Birthday, Strunk and White!“The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White has been released in a 50th anniversary edition. Prized for its focus on clear, concise language, this famous “little book” has been a source of guidance for writers, copy editors and college students for half a century.
But are its rules the be all and end all of writing?
Geoffrey K. Pullum, professor of linguistics
Patricia T. O’Conner, grammarphobia.com
Stephen Dodson, languagehat.com
Ben Yagoda, professor of English
Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl
A Disservice to AllGeoffrey K. Pullum, a professor of general linguistics and head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, is a co-author with Rodney Huddleston of “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.”
The anodyne style advice that Strunk and White offer is harmless enough. I’m as ready as the next guy to “be clear” and “omit needless words.” But the uninformed grammar rules offered in “The Elements of Style” are a different matter.
The simplistic don’t-do-this, don’t-write-that instructions offered in the book would not guarantee good writing if they were obeyed. Indeed, they are often violated in the very paragraphs that Strunk and White use to present them. The section warning against the passive, for example, is replete with passives. (And anyway, the passive is a perfectly useful and respectable type of clause; there is no merit in blanket warnings against it.)
Some of the commands would be all but impossible to follow: “Write with nouns and verbs,” for example. No one avoids all use of adjectives and adverbs. Certainly not Strunk and White.
Above all, the book’s edicts contradict educated literary usage, even that of books published when Strunk was young and White was a baby.
“None of us are perfect” is not a grammar mistake; nor was it a century ago.
“Everybody brought their own” was good standard English for Jane Austen, and so it is today in the hands of any expert user of the language.
And I don’t know how anyone can seriously accept that we should write: “The culprit, it turned out, was he.”
Again and again, Strunk and White recommend the stuffy and unidiomatic, and warn against what sounds effective and natural. Even their beliefs about English as it used to be are wrong; but foisting their prejudices on today’s students is much more so. Pointless nagging about mythical shibboleths brings grammar instruction into disrepute. It makes students nervous without teaching them about sentence structure. That is a disservice to education.
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We’ve Moved OnPatricia T. O’Conner is the author of the grammar guide “Woe Is I” and other books on language, including the new “Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language,” written with Stewart Kellerman. She and Mr. Kellerman have a language Web site and blog at grammarphobia.com.
Rereading Strunk and White on its 50th birthday is like meeting an old lover and realizing how much you’ve outgrown him. Things have changed, little book, and you have not, or not enough.
Oh, the first 14 pages are still the gospel truth. And I still love the things I loved most — the “Elementary Principles of Composition” and the reminders at the end of the book. Any young person prone to getting tattoos might consider having a few of these permanently engraved where they can readily be seen: Omit needless words. Use concrete language. Be clear. Avoid fancy words. Revise and rewrite. Pure gold.
But much of the grammar and usage advice in the rest of the book is baloney, to use a good concrete word. “He” has not been the default pronoun for both genders since “the beginnings of the English language” (only since the mid-18th century). Nobody these days uses “shall” instead of “will” in the first-person future tense.
The advice on “data” and “media” is outdated, as is some of the stuff about verbs. I see nothing wrong — and neither does Merriam-Webster’s — with “loan” or “state” as verbs, or “fix” to mean mend, or “gotten” as a participle for “get.” Nor am I losing sleep over “certainly” and “prestigious” and “offputting.”
Finally, “six persons” is not better than “six people.” Show me a guy who invariably says “six persons” and I will show you a fathead. But Happy Birthday anyway, Strunk and White.
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I’m Moving OnStephen Dodson, an editor, blogs at languagehat.com.
I have been attacking Strunk and White for many years. On my blog, I have called it “that mangiest of stuffed owls,” “the bible of those who want to sneer at other people’s use of language without bothering to actually learn something about it themselves” and a “malign little compendium of bad advice.”
But in the comment thread to my latest Strunk-bashing post, a reader said he had “close to zero knowledge of linguistics” but was “fascinated by the arguments” for and against the book,” and he quite admirably followed up by acquiring a copy and reading it. He then came back to review it, saying:
The rules are short on explanation, background, detail and useful context. So, the book is not the elegant historic relic I hoped for; nor is it an evil, nasty little mindrotter. Either would have been worth the price. I suppose you would have to live with the constant praise of the thing (like Tolstoy with Shakespeare) to get decently angry about it. There are better things to be angry about: like an education system that has college kids unable to write a decent essay, and that turns for a remedy to this inadequate work.
I found that I agreed with him. As I said in my reply, “it’s not evil (though Geoffrey K. Pullum, a co-author of “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,” likes to talk as if it were), just undercooked and overpraised.” I told him that the reason some of us express what may seem excessive anger about it is precisely that we “have to live with the constant praise of the thing.”
If people would stop touting it as the Indispensable Book and using it as a weapon, we wouldn’t have to annoy them with our attacks.
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A Matter of StyleBen Yagoda, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, is the author of “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made,” “The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing,” “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It” and the forthcoming “Memoir: A History.”
“The Elements of Style” is a strange little book. Part of the strangeness is its ever-shifting use of the word “style.” In chapter one, “Elementary Rules of Usage,” we’re in the regulatory world of “The Chicago Manual of Style”: a set of (only!) 11 rules for the use of English words and punctuation. For example, we are told to put a comma after the “white” in “red, white, and blue.” It’s hard to refute that, but one wonders why it deserves nearly half of one of the book’s fewer than 100 pages.
In the second chapter, “Principles of Composition,” the conception of style broadens a bit, to mean something like propriety and effectiveness. “Use the active voice,” the reader is advised. “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” “In summaries, keep to one tense.” Again, most of the positions are difficult to dispute, and again, it is hard to figure out why these particular 22 principles were selected.
Broader still is the final chapter, “An Approach to Style,” written by E.B. White himself. He offers a list of guidelines, including “Place yourself in the background,” “Do not affect a breezy manner” and “Do not inject opinion.” “The approach to style,” he concludes, “is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.”
White purports to be talking about “style” but is really advocating a particular style. It is a style of absence: absence of grammatical mistakes, breeziness, opinions, jargon, clichés, mixed metaphors, wordiness and, indeed, anything that could cloud the transparency of the prose and remind readers that a real person composed it.
And that is the strangest thing of all. If you are writing about something that’s important to you, why should you want to disappear? E.B. White himself certainly never retreated to the background. His prose style is orderly, to be sure, but it only seems to be plain, simple and sincere. Anyone who has paid attention knows that it’s actually opinionated, thorny, idiosyncratic and unmistakable!
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Rules Are Meant to be BrokenMignon Fogarty is the creator of the Grammar Girl podcast and author of Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.
If “Strunk and White” were a movie, it would be a blockbuster, but I find its hallowed status disturbing. White seemed to share this concern and later wrote, “I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.” In an apparent attempt to temper Strunk’s commanding book sections, White’s introduction spends a lot of ink providing anecdotes that humanize Strunk, yet undermine his credibility.
Too many people seem not to have read the introduction.
White notes that Strunk valued boldness and felt it was “worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.” These characteristics led Strunk to state his style preferences as though they were rules. “He had a number of likes and dislikes that were almost as whimsical as the choice of a necktie, yet he made them seem utterly convincing,” wrote White.
White acknowledged that their book was just one voice. For example, of the possessive “s” at the end of “Charles’s,” White says, “Style rules of this sort are, of course, somewhat a matter of individual preference, and even the established rules of grammar are open to challenge.”
White believed that boldness was perhaps the book’s most distinguishing mark. The boldness of ignoring style choices makes “Strunk and White” easy to teach and easy to follow. It’s easier to write quizzes about rules than options, and it’s easier to memorize rules than options, but English is a messy language. Wishing there were hard-and-fast rules doesn’t make it so.
“Strunk and White” is a useful book, but it shouldn’t be the only book you ever consult, and “Strunk and White said so” is not a sure-fire defense in a style argument.
roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/happy-birthday-strunk-and-white/?th&emc=th
