Sept. 16, 2024
I started a subscription to Medium, and have been struck by how basic – and often downright dumb – the advice and direction has been from so-called experts.
“First drafts suck.” (Stop the presses.)
Avoid “bloated sentences” and “fancy” words. (Wow, good to know.)
“Get the apostrophes out of your plurals.” (If that’s an issue, maybe you should consider another calling.)
But the one that sends me screaming for the hills maybe as much as anything else is this continuing insistence that Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style should be required reading and revered.
Please.
The book is breathtakingly simple and obvious – “Do not overwrite” is one piece of sage advice, “Be clear” is another – and yet it has maintained a stranglehold on writers for decades.
I’m not sure why. It’s really more about grammar than style, and is mind-bogglingly banal on both accounts. And it traffics in lessons whose roots are in Latin (the deadest of languages) and have become the coin of the “perfect grammar” realm since being institutionalized by the English elites in the 18th century.
Case in point: You can’t split an infinitive. Faux rule, man. It is based on Latin usage, in which the infinitive form of a verb is one word – amare, for example, means to love, and it is impossible to split. That’s where the prohibition really took hold, and there are a lot more where that came from.
My guess is that it’s like a disease that keeps getting passed down from generation to generation. Oh, and it's old, too. Like your great grandmother's grandmother old.
The first version was published privately by Strunk in 1918, followed by a ton of rewrites and revisions. They may have been useful 50 or 100 years ago. But now? I don’t think so. And a close read finds the rules are contradictory, pedestrian, and downright wrong. I’ll spare you the details. However, people far smarter than I have said the same thing.
Speaking of whom, here’s what Geoffrey Pullum, a British and American linguist who specializes in the study of English, wrote in a masterful 2010 takedown:
“The Elements of Style does real and permanent harm. It encourages the waste of precious
resources – time spent by teachers, students, and copy editors; money spent by English departments and publishers. Genuine faults in writing go neglected because time is spent on nonsense like which-hunting. And worse than that, sensible adults are wrongly persuaded that their grasp of their native tongue is imperfect and their writing is incorrect. No good purpose is served by damaging people’s self-confidence in this way…Linguists should not be shy about
condemning all the harm that this opinionated, influential, error-stuffed, time-wasting, unkillable zombie of a book has done.”
“Unkillable zombie of a book”? Ouch.
Now, just to prove that I’m not “all problem, no solution,” allow me to recommend the only stylebook you’ll ever need:
Garner’s Modern English Usage. It covers the basics then goes further; can be pretty entertaining to read; and reflects where we are now – not where we were a century ago. Get this and you can put Strunk and White in its proper place: the style and grammar graveyard.
Right next to the AP Stylebook. (Oh, Lordy, I can hear the gasps about that now…)
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