Against Style Guides — Sort Of

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From Vulture:

When Lynne Truss wrote, in her best-selling 2003 grammar screed Eats, Shoots & Leaves, of “a world of plummeting punctuation standards,” she was (perhaps unwittingly) joining an ancient tradition. How long, exactly, have shortsighted curmudgeons been bemoaning the poor grammar of the generations that follow theirs? According to Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, the answer is, like, forever: “Some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.”

The notion of being taught language has always been oxymoronic because language is in a constant state of flux, a restless, malleable, impatient entity that, like the idea of now, can never be fixed in place. Take, for instance, the journey of the semicolon as chronicled in the delightful, enlightening new book by Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. The twisty history of the hybrid divider perfectly embodies the transience of language, the ways it can be shaped by cultural shifts that have nothing to do with correctness or clarity. Invented by the Italian humanist and font pioneer Aldus Manutius in the late-15th century, the semicolon was originally “meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon” (hence its design).

Other punctuation marks — such as the “punctus percontativus, or the rhetorical question mark, which was a mirror-image version of the question mark” — turned out to be passing fads, but the semicolon lasted, owing partly to its usefulness and partly to the trends of the day. For much of the early 1800s, usage of the parenthesis and the colon declined drastically. Two grammar guides of the time declared the parenthesis “nearly obsolete,” while another noted, “The COLON is now so seldom used by good writers that rules for its use are unnecessary.” As those marks waned, the semicolon waxed, flourishing to the point of overuse.

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Which brings us to the ubiquitous and notorious The Elements of Style, a 1918 primer by William Strunk, which E.B. White padded out and republished in 1959. In one breath, Strunk & White tell you how to correctly use a parenthesis; in the next they warn against “abominations” like personalize, and in yet another they decree, “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.” Are they teaching the best ways to communicate effectively, or merely passing on the preference of certain editors, writers, and linguists at a fixed point in time? And if language ceaselessly changes, can a grouping of informed suggestions remain useful? If, as I’m inclined to believe, they don’t help much at all, what can? How the hell can people improve their writing?

Let’s back up a bit: Why isn’t Strunk & White’s classic called The Elements of Grammar? For one, it dispenses with grammar in a total of nine pages.
For another, it arrived at the culmination of two centuries in which grammar and style had become synonymous — or, more accurately, had switched places. Grammar, in Lowth’s understanding, was style; since no Ur-grammar existed, even a book of so-called rules was understood to reflect the tastes of its author. But as guide after guide proliferated, and as academic consensus grew (or maybe shrank), the English language was systematized into a “logical” set of rubrics and procedures. By Fowler’s time, grammar had become Grammar, and style was what one did with it. Or should do with it: Where grammar and style were once considered to be sets of suggestions, both are now regarded as sets of commandments.

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The most famous injunction from Strunk & White — “Omit needless words” — is, of course, a style suggestion. But it is good advice nonetheless, and a vigilance against superfluity can legitimately improve your writing. Dreyer implores us to cut back on what he calls “Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers”: very, rather, really, quite, in fact, etc. This too is practical wisdom. But Strunk & White’s specific instruction to, for instance, “use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption and to announce a long appositive or summary” will only help you avoid a minor error, since using a parenthesis instead won’t make your writing less clear. And although the lucidity of Dreyer’s explanation of em and en dashes obviously comes from hard-lived experience, how exactly is it going to help me articulate the murky thoughts in my head?

Link to the rest at Vulture