Against the Elements, For the Style: Debunking Strunk and White
This is getting sent around the Net almost as fast as Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent, so you've likely seen it elsewhere before, but Geoffrey K. Pullum's screed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed against one of the sacred volumes of the American bookshelf, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, will make you look at that little book all over again. He begins:
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.
And he continues with a furious bill of charges against the "grammatical incompetents" who wrote the book. Not against their style, it should be noted--Pullum agrees that White "often wrote beautifully"--but against their edicts. Time and again he shows that their lovely sentences often directly contradict the rules they follow--or even the rules they are stating:
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 beauty of that "as a rule" violating the very rule it is describing is so striking that you wonder if sly Mr. White was putting one over on us. Maybe he and Thurber concocted this whole thing as a joke and then clammed up when it was taken as gospel.
What's the lesson? Trust your ear, not the rules? I don't know--I haven't read Elements for 20 years, but I do still find its rather empty (but stylish) edicts like "Omit needless words" useful to have in the back of my head (even as I violate them even more often than their authors did). --Tom
Anne on April 14, 2009 at 05:35 PM
I'm utterly bewildered and amused by the animus.
I love White--from Stuart Little through This is New York, but most of all for this book. However vague it may seem under scrutiny, its edicts were deeply, deeply useful to me as a high schooler. I read the book many times and learned a lot from it.
Lizhi Liu on April 14, 2009 at 11:33 PM
I want look this book.but I don't know how to buy!