# Grammar experts, grade me!!! **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 4, 2005, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429 "2005-02-04T20:59:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Josh\_dePlume](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Josh\_dePlume](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Josh_dePlume)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2005, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/61 "2005-02-10T05:42:29Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > Stylebooks are, by necessity and purpose, prescriptive. Dictionaries are descriptive. > > There’s nothing wrong here. Perhaps **NattoGuy** meant _proscriptive_. ---
**Author:** ![Walloon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/fbc32d/32.png) [@Walloon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walloon)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2005, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/62 "2005-02-10T05:43:10Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > They never intended you to completely avoid them, and no sane advocate of good writing wood. Most beginners do overuse modifiers; I have copyedited enough shitty prose to know so. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2005, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/63 "2005-02-10T06:02:16Z")
> [@Josh\_dePlume](#): > > Perhaps **NattoGuy** meant _proscriptive_. NattoGuy is not known for fantastic or coherent writing in his posts, but he did mean “prescriptive” in this case. ---
**Author:** ![Othersider](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/cab0a1/32.png) [@Othersider](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Othersider)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2005, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/64 "2005-02-10T06:13:14Z")
> [@Ca3799](#): > > Unclviny (my super-duper brother), who is 40-ish, went to one of those hippie high schools. The school has a bumper sticker that says “TheHighSchoolForThePerformingAndVisualArts”. I don’t think they placed much emphasis on punctuation. Are you all from Houston, or is there another HighSchoolForThePerformingAndVisualArts somewhere? :smack: 😉 ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2005, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/65 "2005-02-10T15:16:01Z")
> [@Walloon](#): > > 😃 Of course, I saw that upon rereading. See what I said about not editing my posts? 🙂 Gaudere’s Law and all that… ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2005, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/66 "2005-02-10T16:16:36Z")
> [@Josh\_dePlume](#): > > I find it especially amusing that the original Strunk _The Elements of Style_ not only doesn’t mention this “rule”, but violates it in a couple of places. Apparently White inserted the discussion and changed Strunk’s “offending” _that_s to _which_s. Of course it was Fowler who invented this from whole cloth. He didn’t pretend that it was an established rule that good writers already followed. > > Despite the _that/which_ thing, I like Strunk and White. “Omit needless words” is good advice that needs to be given despite its simplicity. White violated that rule constantly in his other writings as well. That’s the problem with prescriptivism; most of the idiots giving such advice don’t bother even trying to follow it themselves. > [@pulykamell](#): > > Having just looked over the link you gave, it is clear that the writer completely misses the point of Strunk & White’s advice. “Write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs” _is excellent advice for beginning to intermediate writers_. The power of a sentence comes from these two parts of speech. S&W do not advocate omitting adjective and adverbs. Rather, they proscribe their more careful and judicious use. Is this advice unsound? Hardly not. > > _Elements of Style_ is a collection of _guidelines_, not rules. It’s all but plainly obvious to anyone who reads it. The author of your piece harps on about how S&W use adjectives in the very next sentence after their advice. Well, duh. They never intended you to completely avoid them, and no sane advocate of good writing wood. Most beginners do overuse modifiers; I have copyedited enough shitty prose to know so. > > My advice to any beginning writer would be to learn S&W, use their guidelines, understand the basis for them (which your author obviously didn’t), and once you’re comfortable with the rules and understand them, break 'em. Break 'em left and right. But you need a firm grounding of solid prose before you can have the skill to break the rules. There’s never anything wrong with learning a bit of technique. The problem is that such a “guideline” has no value if it amounts to “use adverbs and adjectives if they’re necessary”. The writer puzzling over style who looks to Strunk and White for advice (rather than any of the reasonable style guides out there) isn’t getting any help at all, if the suggestion is that they use them when they ought to, and avoid them when they ought not. Isn’t that sort of “advice” true of any part of life? I’ve read Strunk and White once or twice as a kid, and promptly returned it to the shelf, and I never bothered with them again. Nonetheless, as a student, virtually every essay I’ve written has been returned with compliments on my writing. Since this is an academic context, all of the strictest style rules ought to be applicable, and yet by writing in a natural way, I’ve managed to handily distinguish myself from my fellow students. Perhaps my professors are too stupid to appreciate “real” academic writing? By the way, you mention in another post that you prefer terse authors. That’s your perogative; I for one have never made it through a Hemingway novel due to his style, and I’m far more impressed by the stylistic flourishes of Shakespeare or Pynchon. We’ll have to agree to disagree on the comparative value of great literature, but you certainly can’t claim that most (or even many) great writers have written in the style of Strunk and White. (Hell, as I observed earlier, White didn’t!) ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2005, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/67 "2005-02-10T22:11:19Z")
> [@Excalibre](#): > > White violated that rule constantly in his other writings as well. That’s the problem with prescriptivism; most of the idiots giving such advice don’t bother even trying to follow it themselves. > > The problem is that such a “guideline” has no value if it amounts to “use adverbs and adjectives if they’re necessary”. The writer puzzling over style who looks to Strunk and White for advice (rather than any of the reasonable style guides out there) isn’t getting any help at all, if the suggestion is that they use them when they ought to, and avoid them when they ought not. Isn’t that sort of “advice” true of any part of life? > > I’ve read Strunk and White once or twice as a kid, and promptly returned it to the shelf, and I never bothered with them again. Nonetheless, as a student, virtually every essay I’ve written has been returned with compliments on my writing. Since this is an academic context, all of the strictest style rules ought to be applicable, and yet by writing in a natural way, I’ve managed to handily distinguish myself from my fellow students. Perhaps my professors are too stupid to appreciate “real” academic writing? > > By the way, you mention in another post that you prefer terse authors. That’s your perogative; I for one have never made it through a Hemingway novel due to his style, and I’m far more impressed by the stylistic flourishes of Shakespeare or Pynchon. We’ll have to agree to disagree on the comparative value of great literature, but you certainly can’t claim that most (or even many) great writers have written in the style of Strunk and White. (Hell, as I observed earlier, White didn’t!) At any rate, I would say that Strunk & White would approve of your writing. Despite your objections to it, you do a very good job of following the guidelines. You obviously have no need for S&W. It also seems you obviously haven’t read the work of people who could use a little S&W. If you’ve followed my posts on linguistics and issues of grammar at all on the SDMB, you would realize that I’m very much against rigid prescriptivism. I rant against the same things you do: outdated notions and grammatical superstitions. However, I find S&W (with a few notable exceptions, like the “which” issue) to be remarkably free of most English teacher voodoo. Strunk doesn’t even claim that a sentence needs to have a subject and a verb, ferchrissake. Like I said, you obviously have no need for this book, as you are a naturally good writer and already follow most of the rules set down by S&W. Tell me that you don’t all you want, but it’s clear to me that you do. Find me a writer who is technically flawed, and I will tell you that S&W is the quickest and most efficient way to achieve clarity. Or do you have a better writer’s boot camp than S&W? ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2005, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/68 "2005-02-10T22:20:34Z")
Let me put it to you another way. I’m a photographer. I occassionally teach photography. There are no real rules to photography, but there are things I can teach a beginner that will make their work better. If I were to concentrate on every little exception to every single rule, it would get nowhere fast. We wouldn’t get past the first lesson. I start with these “rules”, emphasizing they’re guidelines not set in stone: Fill the frame, try composing with the rule of thirds, beware of taking pictures at noon on a sunny day, etc, etc, etc. Every good photographer breaks every single one of these rules all the time. However, as a basis for technique it is necessary to teach and engrain simple techniques in order to ensure a consistent and quality product. As long as you fill the frame and pay attention to your lighting, you can reasonably be assured of a good photograph. Just like if you follow S&W’s guidelines, you can reasonably be assured of a product that is clear, concise, and satisfying to your professor or any other reader. It will not necessarily be a work of art, but it will be technically sound. Once you have this technique down, and once you understand the reasoning behind the guidelines—be it in photography or writing–then you are qualified to break it. Some people have a natural instinct towards the visual or verbal arts. To them, this information may not be as useful because it’s instinctual. To a writer or photographer struggling and in need of guidance, this method has proved to me time and again to be the most effective way to improve photography or writing to a basic level of competence. ---
**Author:** ![mangeorge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d78d45/32.png) [@mangeorge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mangeorge)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2005, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/grammar-experts-grade-me/288429/69 "2005-02-11T00:06:04Z")
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