The quoted blogger is making a worthwhile observation, but it took me a while to get past her casting it as a grammatical point, when it’s really no such thing. (A presentational misstep which can be particularly confusing in this context)
Oh, I’m pretty much there, on independent grounds. Those grounds are, every time I hear someone say “Well, according to Strunk and White…” or words to that effect, what follows is advice I can not see a rationale for, neither in general nor in whatever particular situation is being discussed. I have it on independent authority that I understand how to write well.* Ergo something’s wrong with Strunk and White.
The two most prominent examples that came to mind were the following. My 12th grade English teacher, who in all other ways was quite awesome, nevertheless had this habit of instinctively striking out any and all passive constructions. (She at least got the concept of “passive construction” right, unlike S&W themselves…) I understood even then that usually my passive sentence was just fine and it was her failure to understand the limits of such prescriptions that was at issue. Second, one of my profs insists on the that/which distinction, and once I came to understand what the distinction was supposed to be, I lost just a little bit of respect for said professor.
-FrL-
*Note the difference between “I understand how to write well” and “I always write well.”
Derleth’s link recommends Martha Kolln’s 336 page Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects over Strunk & White. I think that pretty much ends the argument. :rolleyes:
As I said before, if you can argue with S&W, you don’t need it. Leave the book to people who do need it. They are legion.
But even in this thread, presumably among people who don’t need it, the words used in the argument are suspiciously sloppy. S&W are neither descriptivist nor prescriptivist in the usage sense of that divide. They provide some rules for grammar and composition but usage and meaning of words and terms is not really their purview, even though it’s the heart of the d. vs p. dichotomy. They get into it in one section, but any advice on that issue goes out of date as quickly as computer advice. See Strunk’s original 1916 advice for obsolescence. I’m not defending that section of the book, though I note nobody’s referring to it either. I’m saying nothing more than S&W can probably make a business memo or a student essay - or a SDMB post - more readable.
Almost every thread about usage posted here is titled “a question about grammar” or something similar. If you’re answering someone who can make a mistake of that magnitude to begin with, a S&W answer is probably sufficient. Anything beyond that is like throwing in the math when someone asks about Einstein. That may be the best answer, but not the most understandable one or the one best suited for the limited purpose. It’s a modified limited hang out position, to quote that great scholar John Ehrlichman.
Stop the presses! A student has been poorly instructed by a bad teacher mangling a classic text! I always figured that the “omit” rule was a perfect mix of accurate, self-referential and poetic. It’s broadly helpful (the average person is too verbose when writing). The command itself is perfectly pithy (vs “Leave out words you don’t need”). And the crux, I think, is the very fact that the rule is so terse that it forces you to engage it intellectually. You think, “which words are needless?”, and it is no longer a command, but a dialog. If someone doesn’t get the big deal with some colored squares, does that mean Rothko isn’t an artist? Did Charles Manson invalidate the skills of the Beatles?
The problem, as you’ve seen, is that people refuse to let the rules go. They maintain the that/which distinction, the singular they prohibition, and a host of other obsolete suggestions as if they were rules from on high.
Or it can make somone attempt to ‘correct’ another based on what Strunk preferred nine decades ago, now solidified into rock-hard law to be kept more scrupulously than most of the Mosaic commandments. Language education can do better than that. S&W isn’t helping that cause.
Lying in education is not only acceptable, it is laudable. However, and this is key, the lie has to provide a scaffold equal to the task of erecting the real structure. That way, the lie serves as a temporary framework to be removed once the structure is capable of standing on its own.
S&W is no such scaffolding. It is a structure complete unto itself which has very little to do with the building that is an education about grammar. It is in the same region, but there are public lavatories in the same region as Buckingham Palace, too.
I could swear Hellestal was more on your side. Isn’t he the teacher? Or was that you? Who was the one saying the most important thing about good writing is tone? I thought that was him. We also went through some of the rules, and I pointed out that, indeed, some were completely incorrect (particularly examples included in S&W’s section on active vs. passive voice.)
I agree completely that there are no absolutes. I’m also of the opinion that a good writer can break any and every “rule.” But the “rules” are there for a reason and I say that you have to understand them thoroughly before you break them. (Unless you’re a genius, in which case the world is yours.)
Science fiction writing tends to be a small, intimate community, and so I have been part of numerous writers’ groups and have critiqued many beginning writers. When I start reading a story that is simply lifeless, limp upon the page, it is almost invariably true that when I go back and do a sentence by sentence check I circle a “was” in every sentence. Except for effect, you won’t see that in good writing.
Similarly, I had an impossible deadline for an article recently. (Started researching on Thursday, turned in 1500 words on Sunday.) My first draft just placed the information on the page. When I read it I realized that every sentence had a “was”. I rewrote it sentence by sentence. That made an amazing difference.
Now you can argue passive vs. active, and action verbs, and all that, but they are preferred for good reason. And a rule that tells beginners to go back and look for them is a good one, because beginners can’t see for themselves how their prose will be read by others. There may be a good case to be made for a string of "was"s. In my experience, it is more likely that the writer fell into the trap of rote description and needs to be slapped and woken up from that trance.
S&W is a tool, not a panacea. It’s a charge to get your car going on a cold morning, not a complete 10,000 mile service. It’s the start of learning. I realize that for many, it may also be the end. They’re still better off than they were before.
And I still haven’t seen anyone suggest a viable alternative.
I understand what you’re saying here (and generally, I agree with you), but this doesn’t necessarily fit the world of the professional writer.
We do have absolutes. And there are rules from on high. If an editor tells me to capitalize the word “Attorney” or never use the singular “they,” then that’s by golly what I’m going to do if I expect to keep selling my work to him. I’ll fight with book editors over dialog sometimes (especially when I already have the advance in my pocket), but I just do what the magazine editors tell me, whether Strunk & White or Chicago Manual of Style or (Heaven forfend) Eats Shoots & Leaves agree or not.
I’ve never worked in your field, so I don’t know if the SF/Fantasy editors enforce house styles, but the nonfiction people and trade magazines can be pretty rigid.
Hm… that was him. Perhaps I misleadingly simplified his position, but I in turn could swear that Hellestal also said that he was unwilling to condemn Strunk and White as a whole, and perhaps even appreciated it to some nontrivial degree, because it at least got students thinking about their writing, etc. And I made some kind of response, to him or someone else, about how, though students may often end up being better writers after the period in their life where they read S & W than before, this is largely unrelated to their actual experience of having read the book, and simply a consequence of the fact that the factors which led them to the book were the same factors which led them to being more carefully involved in the process of writing; the book is a red herring, yet is often misattributed the credit for such improvements.
I do recall going over the active vs. passive voice section, and some other bits of the book, in explicit detail. Perhaps, with enough reflection, we could reconstruct the thread…
That sounds a lot like the discussion I was having with you.
I think we’ve got a pretty decent recap with all the posts above.
Oh.:smack:
somethingkamell, Kendall something… They kinda look the same.
Good, because I’d hate to have to think and argue anew.
House styles are a completely different animal than S&W. I told you we were conflating several different arguments.
For the first nonfiction book I wrote I was told to use the Chicago Manual of Style. I bought a copy. Then they gave me a sheet with their 50 in-house exceptions.
I did what any sensible person would do. I threw the sheet away, shelved the book, and let the copyeditor handle it.
If a copyeditor ever touched my verbs, however, I’d reach through the screen and commit copycide.
Bravo!
Too bad I wasn’t brave enough to do that on my last big nonfiction book gig. It was a pain in the neck to comply with their house styles.
That previous conversation about S&W was, indeed, from the Lost Weekend. I agree that this thread is a good recap of the arguments.
But I’m gonna get myself on the permanent record anyway.
S&W is shit, but maybe it’s actually helpful for beginners. I suppose it’s possible that folks starting out could learn to develop their own style from reading it. Even if this is true, though, I’d like to believe there’s a better novice book out there, one that can provide easy-to-follow guidelines without drowning itself in empty platitudes and stupid mistakes. But if there’s a better introduction to usage, I personally don’t know what it is.