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THE
ELEMENTS OF STYLE
I
remember reading this book as a youth and I kept saying, "They
just said that you shouldn't write this but when they need to
express something
they have no choice but to WRITE IT THEMSELVES. It made no
sense at all.
They would break the RULE practically in the same sentence
they were DECLARING the rule.
I thought it was weird. Well, others agree with me. Read on,
friend...
THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
By Geoffrey K. Pullum
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
By Geoffrey K. Pullum
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.
The authors won't be hurt by
these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk
was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred
years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author
of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919,
purchasing as a required text the first edition, which
Strunk had published privately. 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.
"Use the active voice" is a
typical section head. And the section in question opens
with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is
either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.
We are told that the active
clause "I will always remember my first trip to Boston"
sounds much better than the corresponding passive "My
first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." It
sure does. But that's because a passive is always a
stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something
newer and less established in the discourse than the agent
(the noun phrase that follows "by").
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.)
These examples can be found
all over the Web in study guides for freshman composition
classes. (Try a Google search on "great number of dead
leaves lying.") I have been told several times, by both
students and linguistics-faculty members, about writing
instructors who think every occurrence of "be" is to be
condemned for being "passive." No wonder, if Elements is
their grammar bible. It is typical for college graduates
today to be unable to distinguish active from passive
clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of being
passive with the semantic one of not specifying the agent
of an action. (They think "a bus exploded" is passive
because it doesn't say whether terrorists did it.)
The treatment of the passive
is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements. The
book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal
eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in
English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors
appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its
own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how
to identify what they condemn.
"Put statements in positive
form," they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent
"not" from being used as "a means of evasion."
"Write with nouns and verbs,
not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist. (The
motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to
me.)
And then, in the very next
sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three
adjectives: "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull
a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."
That's actually not just three
strikes, it's four, because in addition to contravening
"positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs,"
it has a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from
what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates
another edict: "Keep related words together."
"Keep related words together"
is further explained in these terms: "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." That is a negative passive, containing an
adjective, with the subject separated from the principal
verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been
transferred to the beginning. Another quadruple violation.
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.
There is of course nothing
wrong with writing passives and negatives and adjectives
and adverbs. I'm not nitpicking the authors' writing
style. White, in particular, often wrote beautifully, and
his old professor would have been proud of him. What's
wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements
is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often
show up in the authors' own prose on the very same page.
Some of the claims about
syntax are plainly false despite being respected by the
authors. For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece
of bossiness, says that the split infinitive "should be
avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress
on the adverb." The bossiness is unnecessary because the
split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not
need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that.
Strunk's original version never even mentioned split
infinitives. White added both the above remark and the
further reference, in Chapter V, admitting that "some
infinitives seem to improve on being split.") But what
interests me here is the descriptive claim about stress on
the adverb. It is completely wrong.
Tucking the adverb in before
the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence
like "The dean's statements tend to completely polarize
the faculty" places the stress on polarizing the faculty.
The way to stress the completeness of the polarization
would be to write, "The dean's statements tend to polarize
the faculty completely."
This is actually implied by an
earlier section of the book headed "Place the emphatic
words of a sentence at the end," yet White still gets it
wrong. He feels there are circumstances where the split
infinitive is not quite right, but he is simply not
competent to spell out his intuition correctly in
grammatical terms.
An entirely separate
kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is the mismatch
with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which
students could perform for themselves using downloaded
classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show
that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar
claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established
literary usage.
Consider the explicit
instruction: "With none, use the singular verb when the
word means 'no one' or 'not one.'" Is this a rule to be
trusted? Let's investigate.
Try searching the script of Oscar
Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for "none
of us." There is one example of it as a subject: "None of
us are perfect" (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It
has plural agreement.
Download and search Bram Stoker's
Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of "none of us" with
singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural
("I think that none of us were surprised when we were
asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of
sunset").
Examine the text of Lucy Maud
Montgomery's popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There
are no singular examples, but one with the plural ("None
of us ever do").
It seems to me that 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.
Is the intelligent student
supposed to believe that Stoker, Wilde, and Montgomery
didn't know how to write? Did Strunk or White check even a
single book to see what the evidence suggested? Did they
have any evidence at all for the claim that the cases with
plural agreement are errors? I don't think so.
There are many
other cases of Strunk and White's being in conflict with
readily verifiable facts about English. Consider the claim
that a sentence should not begin with "however" in its
connective adverb sense ("when the meaning is
'nevertheless'").
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.
The copy editor's old bugaboo
about not using "which" to introduce a restrictive
relative clause is also an instance of failure to look at
the evidence. Elements as revised by White endorses that
rule. But 19th-century authors whose prose was never
forced through a 20th-century prescriptive copy-editing
mill generally alternated between "which" and "that."
(There seems to be a subtle distinction in meaning related
to whether new information is being introduced.) There was
never a period in the history of English when "which" at
the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an
error.
In fact, as Jan Freeman, of
The Boston Globe, noted (in her blog, The Word), Strunk
himself used "which" in restrictive relative clauses.
White not only added the anti-"which" rule to the book but
also revised away the counterexamples that were present in
his old professor's original text!
It's sad. Several generations of
college students learned their grammar from the uninformed
bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation
of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and
insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or
"was" or "which," but can't tell you why. The land of the
free in the grip of The Elements of Style.
So I won't be spending the
month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated
and underinformed little book that put so many people in
this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too
much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a
serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting
subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch
of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of
idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've
broken their own misbegotten rules.
Geoffrey K. Pullum is head of
linguistics and English language at the University of
Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge
University Press, 2002).