{"id":118,"date":"2009-04-24T10:32:01","date_gmt":"2009-04-24T15:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/04\/24\/strunk-and-white\/"},"modified":"2009-04-24T10:32:01","modified_gmt":"2009-04-24T15:32:01","slug":"strunk-and-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/04\/24\/strunk-and-white\/","title":{"rendered":"Strunk and White"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll admit to being a bit of a grammar geek (in addition to several other kinds of geek), so I was interested in Geoffrey Pullum’s takedown of Strunk and White<\/a> in the Chronicle of Higher Education.\u00a0 I have positive impressions of Strunk and White from school, but I haven’t actually looked at it much in recent years.<\/p>\n

Some of the review’s criticisms are kind of silly, I think:<\/p>\n

Notice what I am objecting to is not the style advice in Elements,<\/em> which might best be described the way The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I want to defend “Omit needless words.”\u00a0 What it means is that you should constantly ask yourself as you’re writing (or better yet as you’re editing) whether you’re including unnecessary words or not.\u00a0 It’s not just a matter of knowing which words are unnecessary; the more important point is that this is something you should pay attention to. This is actually one of the most useful of all S&W’s maxims, and one of the hardest to follow.<\/p>\n

The really scathing part of the review is the stuff about grammar and usage (as opposed to style).\u00a0 Pullum makes a convincing case that S&W are utterly incoherent on a lot of these points:<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n