This was never a thread about grammar. Nobody here has talked about grammar or downgraded people for poor grammar.
Just out of curiosity, though, what do you recommend for people if not S&W?
I consulted A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language to figure out the genitive plural of “Arkansas”. This big, fat volume should answer most of your grammatical needs.
Pullum?
But I hardly know him!
Do you really find it that remarkable that somebody could be talented at doing something, while being unable to analyze it accurately and poor at teaching it?
In Strunk & White’s diatribe against the passive, three of four examples that they cite do not contain any passive construction! Calling someone “contrarian” is hardly a criticism if they are contradicting erroneous nonsense.
So your (and Pullum’s) claim is that White wrote beautifully without having any idea how he did it or why it was good. There is certainly some truth to the idea that many people can intuitively write well without being able to articulate in precise linguistic terminology why one version of a sentence is better than another, but it’s surely a huge stretch of credibility to believe that White was as ignorant of English grammar as Pullum would like us to believe. The major criticism of S&W, coming mainly from those of a strong descriptivist inclination, is that rules are only guidelines and that any statement uttered by a native English speaker that is lucid and perhaps even creatively expressive is good English regardless of what rules it may be flouting, so I fail to see why the ability to explain the technical minutia of grammatical structure is suddenly so important to descriptivists like Pullum and yourself.
Here is a guy who is touted as a famous expert in legal writing who takes issue with many of Pullum’s criticisms. (Ironically, this was the first article to turn up when I followed Pullum’s advice to try a Google search on “great number of dead leaves lying”.) He addresses them several points at a time in a series of newsletters, so this one covers only a few of them, but it includes the bit about the passive voice. It’s the only one where he acknowledges that Pullum does have a point of sorts in that some of White’s “passive” examples are misleading. But though three out of the four examples may not, strictly speaking, be passive, all of them can be improved and strengthened with some restructuring. For example, on the “dead leaves” example, he says “[it] isn’t passive—it’s just weak. Fair enough, but Strunk & White’s advice—favor active transitive verbs and avoid weak openers such as ‘there were’—still holds true. As the authors note, strong verbs will make your writing ‘lively and emphatic’.”
My general belief is that S&W is still a good resource for beginners and those learning ESL, and to some degree even for those who consider themselves good writers. But for most good writers who want to be better writers, the best resource IMHO isn’t anybody’s rule book, but learning by example by doing a lot of reading of a lot of great writers, and E.B. White would be among them.
Yep, at 1779 pages it should be in everybody’s pocket for consultation. 