The Limp Platitudes and Inconsistent Nonsense of Strunk & White
In my first semester of law school, I got into a brief classroom contretemps with an instructor over a matter of grammar. The instructor believed that a sentence of the form ‘there is a controversy about x’ is in the passive voice. Opining that good writing avoids passive constructions whenever possible, she stated her preference for the appalling formulation ‘a controversy exists about x.’ I interjected that ‘there is x’ is not a passive construction, and that there is nothing generally wrong with the passive voice anyway.
The instructor derisively awarded me a “gold star for the day,” trivializing my challenge to her usage dictatorship (while leaving it unclear to all whether she was admitting I was right). She then renewed a prior demand of absolute conformity.
I sat back, withdrew to somewhere inside Wernicke’s area, and silently counted the times she violated her own capricious rules. I may be a snoot, in David Foster Wallace’s sense (pdf), but I am not bullheaded.
This year, 2009, was the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. Linguist and grammarian Geoffrey Pullum wishes it would rest in peace.
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
Zing! There is a common malady among Americans of the English-class-high-performer type—people who are otherwise attitudinally permissive, but who inexplicably submit themselves to the total embrace of certain stodgy precepts of grammar, syntax, and diction. This malady is viral. And though none can say whether we would suffer from it had this book never been written, it is clear that The Elements of Style sits at the vector origin of this particular memeplex.
More from Pullum:
The book’s contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don’t apply to them. But I don’t think they are. Given the evidence that they can’t even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like “subject” and “verb” and “phrase,” but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.
* * *
What’s wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up in the authors’ own prose on the very same page.
Read Pullum’s whole piece and be absolved of needless anxiety over the passive voice, split infinitives, and interchangeable use of ‘which’ and ‘that’ to introduce relative clauses. It’s ok. There are no rules against those things. And there never have been. They were the product of the dogmatic and uninformed imaginations of William Strunk and E.B. White, “a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.”
Via Austin Frakt.
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The professor who gave you a gold star is a whack job. I remember the ceremony. That class made me ask whether I was in law school or third grade.
I do not like the passive voice. The Reagan administration ruined it. It replaced “we fucked up” with “mistakes were made” and allowed future wrongdoers to dodge resposibility with a simple passive construct.