From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.
I won’t be celebrating.
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.
. . . .
After Strunk’s death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.
This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.
Notice what I am objecting to is not the style advice in Elements, which might best be described the way The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes Earth: mostly harmless. Some of the recommendations are vapid, like “Be clear” (how could one disagree?). Some are tautologous, like “Do not explain too much.” (Explaining too much means explaining more than you should, so of course you shouldn’t.) Many are useless, like “Omit needless words.” (The students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction.) Even so, it doesn’t hurt to lay such well-meant maxims before novice writers.
Even the truly silly advice, like “Do not inject opinion,” doesn’t really do harm. (No force on earth can prevent undergraduates from injecting opinion. And anyway, sometimes that is just what we want from them.) But despite the “Style” in the title, much in the book relates to grammar, and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious. Since today it provides just about all of the grammar instruction most Americans ever get, that is something of a tragedy. Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them, but that is not true of the grammar stipulations.
. . . .
For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.
After this unpromising start, there is some fairly sensible style advice: The authors explicitly say they do not mean “that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice,” which is “frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.” They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.
Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle everything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word’s grammar checker underlines every passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done. But it is not what I am most concerned about here.
What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. “At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:
- “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
- “It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had” also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
- “The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired” is presumably fingered as passive because of “impaired,” but that’s a mistake. It’s an adjective here. “Become” doesn’t allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that “A new edition became issued by the publishers” is not grammatical.)
Link to the rest at The Chronicle of Higher Education and thanks to Meryl for the tip.
If the quality of the writing and individual examples used in a style guide are poor, this undermines its ability to perform the function it was designed to accomplish.
The article refers to a number poorly written sentences from the book that violate S&W’s own “Style” advice.
Example given in the article: “The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning.”
Not only does this–as the author mentions–violate a number of S&W’s “rules”, the sentence’s “Style” makes the rule it advocates more difficult to understand.
The S&W sentence as re-written by me (Total time: About one minute).
“A phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning of a sentence should not separate the subject of that sentence and the principle verb.”
If a book that is said to be a definitive guide to style contains many examples of sentences that are so poorly written they impede understanding, its value in the area it claims expertise in is–to put it mildly–questionable.
The only rule I strive to adhere to as a writer is, “don’t lose the reader”. There may be passive voice, there may be split infinitives, there may be comma errors.
I think it’s good to study and learn proper grammar, because it helps maintain the language in a way that the majority can understand. I personally don’t want to go back to how English was hundreds of years ago, when spelling and grammar was like the wild, wild West, bring your own rules.
But, we also need to adapt to some extent, because English is a living language and the world is changing. Basics like punctuation and spelling should pretty much remain static, but word usage can and will change (bling, rad, awesome, hopefully).
It’s like being on a giant teeter-totter, but we’ll manage.