You don’t say!
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Oh, I’m sure he’s read "“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” by Sokal.
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My favorite.
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We used the Bedford Handbook, which was more technical. It’s another good general grammar reference.
https://www.amazon.com/Bedford-Handbook-Diana-Hacker/dp/1457683032
Also, LISP will save us all. Someday, once everyone figures out how lame everything else is.
I’ll wait.
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“Say what you want to say, and get out.”
Best piece of writing advice ever. It applies to sentences, paragraphs, papers. Say it; be done.
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Hah! Sorry - I meant it was misused in that most of the meme images out there say “grammar saves lives” when “punctuation” is more accurate.
“Your model was very complicated, so I simplified it.” Now it’s right 90% of the time instead of 99.99%, but you can understand it. When do I pick up my prize?"
Also good for various fields of engineering are, “let us assume the horse is spherical”, “2+2=5 for unusually large values of 2”, and “let us choose units such that pi equals one”.
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THAT TOO!
I sense a disturbance. Oh wait, it’s just the grammar Nazi’s screaming out in rage. Carry on.
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For heaven’s sake. Sure, let’s make this about the author. Who the hell is Pullum? Well, going only from his article, he’s some guy who presents a pretty serious argument that Strunk & White contains a lot of outright incorrect syntactical information, even considering the time and place it was written. But why would we deign to actually consider his criticism, when we already know it’s of something more famous and popular? 
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"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.’
I don’t think the recommendations are vapid. I’m not a good writer, so guidelines like these are useful when I’m editing. First pass I might look for places I’ve over explained and remove entire paragraphs. Then I might make a second pass where I use too many words. I’ve found that simplifying sometimes helps with clarity.
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Brian Regan, anyone?
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I think the real issue is the period when Elements of Style was written. It was a time when prescriptivism (telling people how they should write based on “intuition and prejudice”) was an accepted way of doing things. In the years since, grammar advice has become more descriptive (telling people how writers actually write).
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Did Pullum write any beloved stories about barnyard animals?
Well there you go then.
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There are actually a number of rules for which they cite counter-examples, then go one to tell you that way of doing it is archaic and dumb.
That seems kind of asinine, but that’s just one Charles’ opinion, though.
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Interesting point. As someone who still does a little teaching of physics, I’m increasingly aware of just how bad the language of physics really is. There is far too much stuff that requires rote learning, far too much arbitrary terminology, too many in-jokes and little attempt to clean up the terminology. (As a few common examples X-rays and gamma rays are still referred to even though they are the same thing, just originally identified from different sources; “beta-particles” and “alpha particles” are still used even though they are respectively electrons and He-4 nuclei; and the SI prefixes are illogical, since for instance “nano” (dwarf) is smaller than “micro” (small). I believe some slow progress is being made to tidy some things up, but even so teachers have to spend an awful lot of time on terminology rather than concepts.)
Physicist, heal thyself would be a good starting point.
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I, too.
I was taught from Fowler & Fowler’s “The King’s English” (1906, but still tolerably fresh). On the first page they say…
Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
Prefer to concrete word to the abstract.
Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
Prefer the short word to the long.
Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
The last of these rules is accost immediately qualified because there are many exceptions. They say that someone following this last rule rigorously would confuse their readers by beginning their book with a ‘forward’ - which is (or may be) Saxon, whereas ‘preface’ is English. Their other example - using ‘Englishing’ (good Elizabethan English but sounds odd) rather than ‘translation’ (Latin root but the word we actually use) still holds.
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Often this kind of approximation helps ensure you recognise the right answer when you get it.
Choosing units in physics is a good idea. My introduction to classical mechanics was something like “Using a system of units in which the unit of length is the diameter of a proton, the unit of mass is the mass of a proton, and the unit of time is the time taken for light to travel the diameter of a proton”…it makes calculations of particle interactions rather easy. Once you’ve solved the problem it’s easy to convert to SI. One of my favourite units is the inverse femtobarn. It’s a typical bit of physics mystery-making, but what it gives you as a remarkably convenient number for measuring the effective illuminance of a particle beam in an accelerator, and it’s no more complex to understand than miles per gallon.
Can’t think why, as the Saxons were just one lot of invaders. Anti-Norman snobbery?
Nothing wrong with Romance words, what was wrong was the attempt by Arnold and his successors to turn English into Latin and produce a dialect which could be understood and used as a shibboleth by public schoolboys, thus reinforcing the value of fee paying education. Arnold chose Latin as his model for Rugby because, surprise surprise, that was what he had a degree in.
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Someone should mention Steven Pinker here. Someone with more cred than me.
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I think the real issue is that in some cases S&W seem not to follow their own advice, and don’t seem aware that they’re not following it. When they limit their advice to matters of style, it’s useful or it’s not. That’s up to you, of course. When their advice concerns grammar (that is, the structure of language), they don’t always seem to know what they’re talking about.
And even if they’re coming from a prescriptivist point of view, Pullum points out that their opinions seem totally arbitrary, seeing as they are contradicted by authors whose work is considered (even by S&W) worthy. Then again, prescriptivist approaches are always arbitrary.
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