Strunk'd
So Edinburgh linguist Geoffrey Pullum does not like William Strunk and E.B. White’s Elements of Style:
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
As someone who was assigned and tested on the Elements in one of my very first undergraduate classes and still harbors a near-religious devotion to conjoining my infinitives and keeping my “however“s tucked safely in the middles of my sentences, my initial reaction when I started reading this piece was to get, well, a bit defensive – but there’s no denying that Pullum makes a strong case. For example, consider Strunk and White’s notorious “however” rule:
However. Avoid starting a sentence with ‘however’ when the meaning is “nevertheless.” The word usually serves better when not in first position. (Elements, p. 48)
Comments Pullum:
Searching for “however” at the beginnings of sentences and “however” elsewhere reveals that good authors alternate between placing the adverb first and placing it after the subject. The ratios vary. Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania, checked half a dozen of Mark Twain’s books and found roughly seven instances of “however” at the beginning of a sentence for each three placed after the subject, whereas in five selected books by Henry James, the ratio was one to 15. In Dracula I found a ratio of about one to five. The evidence cannot possibly support a claim that “however” at the beginning of a sentence should be eschewed. Strunk and White are just wrong about the facts of English syntax.
It goes on like that, with the textbook takes on “that” and “which” (“There was never a period in the history of English when ‘which’ at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an error.”), the number of a verb following “none” (”… the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.”), and even those famous strictures against using the passive voice (“Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.”) coming under similar fire. Indeed, argues Pullum, the real problem seems to be that Strunk and White, though both perfectly good writers who had the good sense not to write in the ways that they told others to, didn’t know anything about grammar at all:
The book’s contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don’t apply to them. But I don’t think they are. Given the evidence that they can’t even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like “subject” and “verb” and “phrase,” but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.
Pullum should know, of course: he’s the author of this big fat book, which having read this essay I’d gladly assign to my intro students in place of Strunk & White if not for the fact that it costs over $160 and runs to nearly 2,000 pages long. (Anyone have some alternative suggestions?) It’s hard, though, not to feel like his criticism sometimes goes a bit beyond its proper bounds, as for example when he seems to blame MS Word’s nasty habit of underlining EVERY SINGLE PASSIVE-VOICE CONSTRUCTION in one of those bothersome green lines on our national love-affair with the Elements (“That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done.”); this may be accurate for all I know, but I’d need to see a bit more evidence.
Similarly, consider that charge I began with, that the “enormous influence” of the Elements “has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it”: I can think of quite a lot of things that have done great damage to the grammatical competence of our nation’s student population, ultimately driving things to a point where college upperclassmen at an institution like UC Berkeley turn in essays riddled with sentence fragments and marked by what seems to be an utter inability to differentiate, say, “one self” from “oneself”, let alone “its” from “it’s”. But blaming it on Strunk and White? Sure, an overly slavish devotion to the grammatical principles of Elements – or of any such handbook, for that matter – is going to make for some unpleasantly stilted prose, but I’m certainly not alone in wishing that more of my students ever showed evidence of “grammatical angst” when it came time to put words on a page (or, worse, an e-mail). Perhaps, since no one teaches grammar anyway, those of us in the humanistic disciplines with other material to get to would do better just to pass out copies of “Politics and the English Language”, run off a few of White’s old New Yorker essays, and tell our sophomores, “Here: write like this“. Given what we’re facing, though, turning to a slim and appropriately bossy text like the Elements seems an obviously understandable reaction.
“The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style“, Pullum calls us. If only.
(Cross-posted.)
When teaching grammar, there’s no substitute for diagramming sentences. That said, what “Elements” sets out to do is actually accomplished in far superior fashion in Joseph Williams’ “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace,” a book which should really be far more widely known than it is. Like Pullum, he jumps on White for the strictures on the passive voice. More importantly, however, he teaches students how to actually think about style and what they are trying to accomplish when they write.
— Boz · Apr 12, 05:14 AM · #
Pullum’s problem is that he is one of those tiresome academics who believe that, because people don’t always follow rules, therefore there ought not to be any rules. Well, sorry, but the fact that a lot of people, even some of the very best people, murder other people is not a legitimate argument for ignoring the rules against murder.
The fact that Strunk & White are popular with people whose job it is to teach good writing style suggests that their prescriptions might, just might, be in tune with what those professionals think that the rules ought to be.
Pullum is functionally just another aggrieved adolescent who goes around pointing out hypocrisy on the part of grownups, apparently thinking that thereby grownups don’t know what they’re talking about. Time for little Geoffrey to grow up and get with the program.
— Tim of Angle · Apr 12, 11:42 AM · #
Tim: Do you know something more about Pullum than I do, or are you basing your remarks just on this essay? Because he is, in fact, an expert on the rules of English grammar – his point is just that Strunk and White were not …
— John Schwenkler · Apr 12, 02:09 PM · #
Tim, in your rush to condemn Pullum you seem to have overlooked the fact that he is in fact one of the world’s leading experts on English grammar. In fact, at the Language Log (where he blogs), a recurring topic is what might be called rational prescriptivism, teaching people to write clearly and effectively, as opposed to the reactionary, superstition-and-magic prescriptivism given by S&W.
Pullum himself recommends Williams’ “Style: Toward Clarity and Grace”, so that might make a good replacement text for your teaching, John.
— JS Bangs · Apr 12, 10:07 PM · #
Thanks to both JS and Boz for the Williams recommendation; it’s a bit longer than Elements, of course, but I’ll give it a look.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 13, 02:39 AM · #
The revered Joseph William’s take on passive/active is just about identical to Strunk & White’s. Prefer the active, usually. Not always. Pullum’s a boob.
— Wallace · Apr 13, 11:16 AM · #
However you slice it, the issue boils down to the difficulty of educating massive numbers of students into basic English literacy without the benefit of a slim and arbitrary volume. The alternative is a much longer and unofficial education into the nuances and ‘feel’ of extended, constant use.
— James · Apr 13, 12:12 PM · #
Wallace,
The difference between Williams’ and Strunk and White’s takes on active vs. passive is that Williams actually knows what the passive voice is.— George · Apr 13, 01:38 PM · #
George,
You can’t believe everything Pullum says. He’s selective at best. If you read the section of EOS in question, you’ll see that S&W in fact do have a handle on what the passive voice is. Pullum pulled his “damning” examples from after this S&W statement: “Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as ‘there is’ or ‘could be heard.’” And the examples that follow match those criteria perfectly. Pullum recognizes this, of course. But actually quoting the full context would weaken his case. I think, though, that if you can read the S&W examples and not recognize the improvements they’re pointing out, it’s probably not the book for you.
— Wallace · Apr 13, 02:12 PM · #
One source that may prove helpful is Revising Prose by Richard Lanham. Its “paramedic method” helps students recognize “which words are needless.”
— Leo Kallis · Apr 14, 09:01 PM · #