I tagged Geoffrey Pullum's rant against The Elements of Style for del.icio.us a few days back, because it struck me as interesting, but I didn't have time to say more. In the subsequent days, I've seen a bunch of "Preach it, Brother Pullum!" responses, most recently from revere. I've also received the copyedited manuscript of the book-in-production, so I've been thinking a bit about grammar and style in my own writing.
Most of the pro-Pullum responses I've seen seem to me to be missing the point. Or, rather, they're criticizing the book because it's not very good as an absolute and prescriptive guide to what constitutes good writing, when that isn't what the book is.
Many of the practices and constructions that Strunk and White rail against are perfectly good, and occasionally essential. Good writers can, do, and even should use many of these elements in their writing, and indeed, Strunk and White use some of these elements in their own book. The thing is, Strunk and White isn't intended as a prescriptive guide for people who are already good writers-- it's more of an aspirational guide for people who aren't good writers yet.
While a slavish adherence to the rules presented in The Elements of Style would have unfortunate results for people who already write well, it would be a clear improvement for most college students. Just an attempt to follow the guidelines in Strunk and White would make most of the lab reports I have to grade dramatically better.
Strunk and White isn't going to teach you the grammar you need to know to become "head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh" like Geoffrey Pullum, in the same way that Halliday and Resnick isn't going to teach you the physics you need to know to become a college professor. There will come a time when you need to move beyond the most basic textbooks. But when you're just starting out, they'll give you the basic ideas that you need to get your feet under you, and prepare yourself for the next steps.
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The problem is that Strunk & White is simple wrong about grammar in many cases, so it's more like learning physics from Aristotle. (Pullum was focusing on the grammar advice, not the style advice.)
Even though Strunk & White give some bad grammatical advice, Chad's point still stands. Yes, there are much better style guides out there. But if any college freshman manages to absorb even some of The Elements of Style â that's a victory.
I liked Strunk & White, but I liked it in Junior High and High School. I liked it because it helped me improve my writing -- for a time -- before I was a competent communicator of ideas. And before I knew what the grammatical rules were, and what function they served. Once I knew that, I was comfortable breaking many of the rules that were either arbitrary or archaic; it's allowed me to become the writer I am now.
And I make mistakes and have flaws, and I have a penchant for starting sentences with "and". I think a period often looks happier outside of quotes; I like using semicolons where they're not wrong. And in some instances, when you have not just one, or even two, but three items, I like to use the Oxford Comma.
"The Elements of Style" probably helped me to think about how to write while I was in my teens, but I'm 54 now and my writing style has pretty-well solidified. I think I learned more from reading good writers like Twain, Hardy, and Conrad.
I wouldn't call it a victory if they absorb the wrong things from it. I see a lot of terrible writing from adults who worship the book. Since there are much better style guides, why not have students read those instead?
Strunk and White was useful to me when I was refining my English - as a second language, remember - back in high school. That is when I went to state and national competitions in English proficiency and also when I first moved from reading to also writing in English. And even then, reading S&W, I understood that theirs are just guidelines that make you think, not hard and fast rules. And I learned there a word that they used as an example of a no-no but I liked it and used it several times since: 'discombobulated'.
It isn't so much that The Elements of Style is bad, but the rules are not presented in a nuanced enough fashion to suit any expert. It reminds me a little of the time when I went back to re-read a book I initially loved (Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas) and it struck me as annoyingly anthropomorphic and sloppy in its' analysis. My understanding of the underlying science had gotten too sophisticated (or at least, I thought of the underlying science as too complicated) to appreciate the book in the same way.
Also, "discombobulated" is a fantastic word.
S&W is wrong too much of the time. W didn't even follow those "rules" - which would all be okay if people didn't worship S&W and treat it as though it had been handed down from Sinai.
You want a good book on writing - try Joseph Williams' "Toward Clarity and Grace".
Good writers can, do, and even should use many of these elements in their writing, and indeed, Strunk and White use some of these elements in their own book.
It's the same with any other artistic endeavor. You need to know what the rules are in order to get your point across. What separates the artists from the hacks is that the artists know when and how to break those rules.
That's why we remember Beethoven and the Beatles: both took established musical genres (classical music and 50s rock, respectively) and breaking some of the rules to create great art. You're probably familiar enough with the Beatles to see what I'm saying. For a better idea of Beethoven's innovations, I suggest Peter Schickele's "sportscast" of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; it doesn't matter that you don't already know the relevant conventions of classical music, because Schickele and his "color man" explain them as the piece goes along.
The same thing goes with writing. A good writer will sometimes break with Strunk and White's prescriptions to achieve a desired effect. A mediocre writer is better off sticking with the formula, because otherwise (as you see too often in your students' lab reports) they tend to become incoherent. Yes, the evolution of language has rendered some of the prescriptions obsolete. But it's a good starting point, as I found when I first encountered it in high school, and as Coturnix found when learning English as a second language.
I wouldn't call it a victory if they absorb the wrong things from it. I see a lot of terrible writing from adults who worship the book.
Trust me, that terrible writing would be much more terrible if they hadn't read Strunk & White. You need to read more prose from high school students. Or worse, engineers.
Since there are much better style guides, why not have students read those instead?
No argument there. :) All I'm saying is that a mediocre style guide is much, much better than no style guide.
Is good old H&R still the standard for physics knowledge in the college setting? Wow, that brand has staying power--I remember it from 30 years ago at Stanford.
I agree with you on both counts - that college students generally could use a good "aspirational guide" to improve their writing, and that guides should not be considered an "absolute and prescriptive guide to what constitutes good writing" in a language as flexible and dynamic as English.
Dan Blum (comment #1 and #5) notes that Dr. Pullum was concentrating on the accuracy of The Elements of Style as a particular style guide. I can't comment either way on that (I haven't actually read it, and am not a linguist in any case) but I read Dr. Pullam's article as advocating for *better* style guides, rather than against style guides in general.
Of course, the main topic of your post is not the article but rather comments in support of it. For better or for worse, I think a lot of people DO consider S&W an absolute and prescriptive guide. Perhaps Strunk and White are drawing some heat intended for the grammar nazis.
I follow and use Strunk and White because it promotes clear, complete, correct, and concise writing. It is not an end all, be all; it is a tool. You need to learn to use the hand tools before we give you the power tools. With the former a mistakes are limited in their damage, with the latter, fingers are lost.
In this thread we have a poster using the "terrible" to connote bad or faulty writing, and another that uses "fantastic" to describe something as good. I tell the students whom I teach I do not want to see fantastic unless they are invoking fantasy, terrible except to describe fear, incredible but to question veracity, and very in only the most dire of circumstances.
Am I a pedantic ogre? No, I am working to break them of habits of just writing and instill in them the practice thinking before they write. Indeed, when writing in art history, you need to describe fantastic scenes, to recognize the purpose of terrible statuary, will run across many incredible texts, and need to use very just once in a 5000 word essay.
As for the poster who sees "a lot" of bad writing, I recommend he stop reading his own prose ;^).
oops...
The practice of thinking... And previewing would be helpful too :^)
As for my 2¢, I think that Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a really good book on practical grammar. If more undergrads could take some of those rules and suggestions to heart, I'd be that much happier.
I tell the students whom I teach I do not want to see fantastic unless they are invoking fantasy, terrible except to describe fear, incredible but to question veracity, and very in only the most dire of circumstances.
Well, please stop it. These are exactly the kinds of arbitrary, disconnected-from-actual-usage "rules" that Pullum, Dan Blum, and others are complaining about. And they're right.
I've long thought "Strunk and White" sounds more like a punishment for bad grammar than a byline. I guess the real question is, just exactly what is strinking anyway, and how does it cause your color to fade?
Evan you misunderstand. Similar to science, art history has a specialized vocabulary. Theory in science is not a hypothesis or method of examination, it is a explanation of many interconnected facts that best models the real world. In art history, fantastic does not mean wonderful, it means drawn from fantasy. When students use fantastic to describe a painting or image that is an accurate rendition, how am I to respond? That usage is disconnected from reality as it inaccurately describes the image or the art. Far from arbitrary, it is educating them on the vocabulary they will see in texts they read and discussions they will hear. I guarantee that when you see fantastic in a scholarly text on Chinese cave paintings, the writer is not discussing the vibrant colors or the nuanced use of line, the writer is speaking of the subject matter being drawn from a source other than that which we universally agree to be reality.
Every discipline uses words in specific manner. In geography scale is an important factor, and where a chemist will agree, the objects in question are completely different.
Pullum, et al may be correct within their discipline; however, they exercise a double standard when they pull stunts such as this one. Without knowing the context or situation, they declare their interpretation to be the best and the only valid option. They either deliberately ignore unfamiliar situations or are so blinded by their perceived perfection that they are incapable of understanding such circumstances exist. Your invective directed towards me provides evidence that you do not understand but are willing to impose your rules of usage despite that ignorance.
English may indeed be a living language but it does not give the writer license to abuse it. When a specialist writes for the lay audience, the author must prepare the the reader for those specific usages to avoid confusion. Few outside the computer networking field know that ATM also stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode, not just the ubiquitous Automated Teller Machines. Although the acronym for Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) is a homonym for the poetry form, the two are as dissimilar as night and day.
Audience, not content, is king.
Bob:
I think you're missing something important here. The simple fact is that terms of art in specific disciplines are usually quite specific, but they don't always match up to standard usage. It's fair to expect specific word usages in certain contexts, yes. But remember that you're teaching them to code-switch, not to change their entire sense of thinking. After all, your definition of "fantastic" is the original one, but it's not the only one -- or even the most recognized one -- in common usage. Far more sensible, says I, to think of a field's terms of art almost as a separate language with different usage rules than to try to force students to incorporate that usage into their standard thinking. (Millions of African-Americans do exactly this on a daily basis, for much the same reason.)
Only Americans ever put punctuation inside quotes when it isn't part of the quoted material. I don't think anyone has ever done it in the entire German or French languages, for example.
See how stupid it is when people turn their own random preferences into universal laws?
John J. Wiens, Ronald M. Bonett & Paul T. Chippindale (2005): Ontogeny Discombobulates Phylogeny: Paedomorphosis and Higher-Level Salamander Relationships, Systematic Biology 54(1): 91 â 110
Some of the rules are just plain wrongâ¦
But neither Strunk nor White knew what the rules are.
Those were already obsolete hundreds of years earlierâ¦
How horrible that a word might have two meanings⦠:-|
I must not be the great [sic] communicator I aspire to be :^).
I am not missing the point, I am emphasizing it. In my first post I stated the intention was to teach students to think before they write. Too often students just write and hope the outcome is what they expected. They ignore the audience, they assume everyone has the same vocabulary they do, and then go on to produce an essay that doesn't achieve the intended goal.
Nowhere did I state that I require students that "all" essays conform to my style guide. My intent is to educate the students to recognize that different audiences translate words in different ways, and that they must write with the intended audience in mind. At one point in time, the vernacular was not acceptable certain circles and great was an adjective of quantity, not quality. Whether the dilution of meaning is an improvement or detriment is irrelevant; it is now the norm. Nevertheless, bringing up the level of discourse, teaching students the art of balancing selection against generalization is still, imho, a worthy endeavor.
I do not demand they abandon vernacular usage. I ask of them to recognize that when the vernacular is in opposition to the scholarly usage, they must, in that situation, defer to the scholarly usage. As one poster said, the best artists are not the ones who arbitrarily flaunt the rules, the best artists are the ones who understand the rules and are able to circumvent them. Picasso's skills at draftsmanship were of such quality that when he applied them to cubism the result was art. If one aspires to write as Samuel Clemens did, then one must first have an equal command of language. On that note, the opinion of Clemens regarding Fenimore Cooper parallels mine of Pullum ;^).
Hi. I thought you might be interested in seeing my blog post today regarding Strunk, White, and Pullum. I hope you enjoy it.
http://blog.textarts.com/2009/04/strunk-and-white-elements-of-style.html
Best regards,
Mark Garvey
Arbitrarily flaunt?
I. M. Flaud
Trinity College, Dublin