The Elements of Style: "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"

boing
61

I’ll admit I don’t know much about postmodern academic discourse; I only hear about it when it gets so “bad” that people complain about it, so I think I am getting a very skewed sample (cf. the Sokal affair - Alan Sokal is a physicist, BTW).

I have, however, had some exposure to more old-fashioned kinds of academic discourse in the humanities. And I’ve even listened to a theologian lecturing about the role of the Orpheus myth throughout European culture.

I find that there is a consistent difference in the use of language between the natural sciences and the humanities - at least here in Austria. The natural scientists use language purely as a tool to convey facts; they are not afraid to use terms opaque to laypeople, but all needless complexity is purely accidental.

In the humanities, however, there are many people who view the artful use of language as an end in itself. They do not put “simplicity” at the top of their style advice. They go for beauty instead.

The electrical engineering course notes I drudged through in my first year at university was one negative example - the sentence structures were so boringly and repetitively simple that I found it very hard to concentrate on the text while reading.
On the other side I’ve seen overcomplex humanities texts that hide severe flaws in reasoning by showing off the author’s mastery of remotely relevant Latin poetry in a deeply nested aside at just the right time.

Now the good professors won’t obscure anything with their language; but a professor of philosophy, theology or ancient history in Austria will just expect their listeners to be able to understand a three-level nested German sentence with the occasional Latin terms without overly taxing their minds.

Some very smart people with a purely scientific/technical education will lack the practice and find it annoying at first, but a high school graduate from a humanities-focused school won’t have any trouble.

Are people in post-modern academia in the English-speaking world doing something similar?

… which is also one of the reasons why I dislike “The Elements of Style”. I enjoy the artful use of language. The constant insistence on “simplicity”, on omitting everything “needless” seems to me a cultural phenomenon of the English-speaking world that has been slowly seeping into other cultures, and I don’t like that trend.

Call me when LISP has a decent type system.

5 Likes
62

And someone figures out how to make it secure.

63

I think in the States at least (can’t speak for other English speaking countries), there is much less of a level playing field with regards to the familiarity of academic language with incoming freshmen. If the kids are coming out of elite private schools or more well funded public schools, they are not going to have a ton of trouble with more complicated language. Kids coming out of less well funded public schools (students that I’m more familiar with) often aren’t going to be as familiar.

I will say that academic language associated with the postmodern turn has really filtered into some parts of the internet in recent years (especially elements of queer, critical race, and feminist theories, with some Foucault thrown around) and while it’s often not used in an academic way, fed through popular culture. If professors can tap into that, then they can use it as a springboard for a conversation about the issues these theories try to address in a more holistic way.

For myself, I always try to talk about race, gender, and power in class and I try to do so in an entirely accessible way. I think I generally succeed.

Does this answer you question? I’m not sure I did.

7 Likes
64

The grammar Nazi’s what?

4 Likes
65
4 Likes
66

When I attended journalism school in the last century, we were trained in what was essentially a less dogmatic and less fussy version of Strunk and White. I still write by those, um, guidelines, and I can tell at a glance writers who have had similar training.

I’m just going to mention two guidelines that trouble Pullum but that I believe strengthen and clarify writing.

  1. Do away with modifiers. Of course, doing so entirely is impossible in real life. We humans created adjectives and adverbs for rational reasons. But it’s also productive to be brutal about such modifiers. If you do away with adverbs, you expose the weak verbs they’ve been propping up, and you can often discover stronger verbs to replace them. Verbs power writing. Finding the best verbs is a good thing. Eliminating adverbs helps you do that.

  2. Use active voice. About 90 percent of the time when I’ve seen passive voice in writing, it’s because the writer was too lazy to find out who the actor was. Passive voice is often a crutch. Flushing it out and excising it when possible can bring greater clarity to writing.

In my current work, I was recently reviewing job applications. It was not a surprise to me that the strongest cover letters and clearest resumes were written by people who had suffered through some kind of journalistic training. I’m not saying that people who haven’t had journalistic training can’t be clear writers. (That would be stupid.) But that kind of writing is strongly correlated with journalism school.

<\sermon>

7 Likes
67

Pullum also makes the point that S&W don’t seem to know what the passive voice is.

And for my money, the passive is often the most natural way to express something. Most passives, in my experience, aren’t Orwellian attempts to avoid responsibility or obscure who did what.

7 Likes
68

You just said “we were trained” and “clearest resumes were written by people who…”. Those are very much in keeping with the passive voice I see most of the time, and don’t strike me as lazy, concealing, or otherwise objectionable at all. I’ve used the versions of Word that Pullum complains about, which admonish you any time something is in the passive voice, and that has taught me it’s very often much worse to try and write out.

Add his examples where S&W mixes up what that voice is, and I think it’s fair to say they are just plain wrong on it. Yes, there is a type of responsibility-obfuscating phrasing you should avoid, and no, it’s not really about the passive voice. No surprise to me a linguistics prof should criticize a book that has probably misled decades of his students on such things, especially if any react to learning its problems half as defensively as what happened here!

8 Likes
69

“The fact that” are unnecessary words.

2 Likes
70

And I tend to find writing by people physics, math, or classics backgrounds clearest. I do hope nobody is surprised by this either.

4 Likes
71

I would gently suggest that a good editor or, further back, a good writer, removed the problematic passive voice before you saw it.

I’m referring to sausage before it was made.

3 Likes
72

Let us choose units such that the answer is equal to unity.

1 Like
73

Don’t care. I’ll always adore this book for pointing a finger and laughing at the unfortunate hyphen in my home town newspaper (product of a merger): The Chattanooga News-Free Press.

7 Likes
74

In my experience, writers quite often use passive voice to avoid responsibility and obscure who did what. Sometimes it’s fine to use passive voice, such as the way old_editor did in his comment.

2 Likes
75

White’s first draft of Charlotte’s Web had a whole essay singing Wilbur’s praises in silk, before it was whittled down to two words. Worked out pretty well for him.

3 Likes
76

Pullum’s arguments against the book are really only valid for someone who is steeped in linguistics and has to produce or consume large amounts of prose on a regular basis. Familiarity breeds contempt, as it were.

But Elements of Style is also a book you can hand to a bright 9 year old and they will begin to glean a concept which beforehand they had only a dull sense of - that of truly good writing and the craftmanship behind it.

To a budding 16 year old novelist deep in the reverie of some shallow aesthetic, “Be clear” is arousing and provocative.

And Pullum has to appreciate that giving no advice at all on clarity would give both sides of the argument purchase. Like laws of nature or personal freedoms, the elements of style do not exist because they are enumerated; they are enumerated because they exist.

5 Likes
77

Nice chiasmus you got there!

1 Like
78

Because it’s a 100 year old book with obvious and well noted flaws (for decades) that no serious English major or literature doctorate student would EVER study as a rule book. The author is tilting at straw men dressed as windmills, and thus worthy of our commentary - who or what else should we make it about?

Elements of Style is an elegant antique of its time, and no one on this board or elsewhere is treating it as a definitive grammar guide.

2 Likes
79

A writer always writes for her audience, and the audience knows it’s the audience. You are specifying things that are already implicitly specified by the context.

(I deleted a sentence that was unnecessary)

1 Like
80

The book is aimed at university undergrads, and says so in the text itself. The audience is understood to be their profs, their TAs, and fellow undergrads.

If I had a dime for every senior high school student who thought long, redundant sentences were a way of sounding smart, I could have retired before I got my full-time contract.

1 Like