Many much moosen.
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On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, I once heard a guy say, “I was having a discourse with John the other day about Doritos” and oh, I want to say he was joking around, but neither he nor the person listening to him cracked a smile once and were being very intense about the whole thing.
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It’s possible. But if so, things like message boards and blogs are surprisingly dominated by good editors and good writers, because even there I rarely see passive voice used in an awful way. Except of course when it’s intended, like the horrible “mistakes were made” – not that an active voice like “mistakes occurred” would help.
Are we so sure? If you read Pullum’s complaint, it’s very plainly because he’s found the exact opposite, that people have been using it that way:
Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.
I know he’s not so famous as Strunk & White, but he’s still head of linguistics at Edinburgh. On what grounds are we sure the problem he describes – that a book nearly everyone knows, containing very inaccurate grammar, has resulted in students misunderstanding grammar – is not a serious nuisance for his field, let alone beyond notice as you declare? Because it really seems to me he’d be in a much better place to know than most people here, myself included, which is part of why I was inclined to listen to his expertise.
And maybe I’m overreacting, but…the way this thread started didn’t exactly make it sound like anyone even considered if he might be right about its pedagogical effects. There are more forms of anti-intellectualism than pretending any use of specialized writing is only pretension and obfuscation, as millie and Mindy rightly denounce.
Another is taking the things we first learned and enjoyed as sancrosanct, things nobody deserves to analyze let alone question. Like how there were nine planets when we were little, so any “astronomer” who thinks they learned otherwise is wrong, no further understanding needed. And since their mistake can be taken as a given, the only thing left to a proper response is furious denunciation. This is a form I particularly hate, because it so often sets would-be enthusiasts against learning and devalues the people most devoted to it. So again, I might be being oversensitive to it.
But then – this is only about a style manual, a book intended to help people with writing and grammar. It’s hard to imagine something that should be more suitable for calm discourse. Yet the first posts didn’t discuss where this linguistics professor argued wrong. They literally went straight to fuck this nobody tosser for doubting our beloved teddy bear, with a nice badge for each insult too. Am I really so mistaken in not seeing that as a considered opinion, but plain hatred of a learned heretic not giving the opinion we require?
And again, if there’s any chance this is how any students react to criticism of this book, I’m not surprised a professor who routinely needs to correct statements in it might quickly go from this classic book has mistakes to this is pernicious ignorance. I don’t know enough to weigh its advantages and disadvantages as a guide, but I can see it makes awful holy scripture.
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Give them Winnie the Pooh and explain why it’s a work of genius, and the job is done.
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Journalism often seems to be the enemy of nuance. Part of the trouble we find ourselves in today is journalists who try to turn everything into absolutes without modifiers, resulting in a black and white world. A journalist shouting in your ear is the enemy of clear thought. And then when the case is clear cut and strong language is needed, the journalist has nowhere to go.
As well as being an example of my paragraph above (shouting over people rather than taking a nuanced view) this is Fake News. Pullum has had a rather distinguished career in both the US and the UK, and his list of work and publications requires a substantial Wikipedia page. Which suggests to me that the problem here isn’t Pullum’s lack of standing but @michaeljtobias not knowing anything about the field of linguistics, and being unwilling to do the most basic background check before sounding off. (I’m just agreeing here in general terms with @milliefink and @Mindysan33 on lazy anti-intellectualism.)
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S&W is, what, 70 pages long. I can’t imagine how anyone could use it as an authority, because if you’re concerned enough about grammar to own a copy, any question you’d need to look up would certainly be too obscure for it to answer.
If I have a question about grammar, I’ll get out the bible-sized Chicago Manual to read about the relevant arcana, and then make up my own mind. Elements of Style, sat next to that on the shelf, makes its point simply by its physical size. I don’t think I’ve actually opened it since I was a bobling.
I’m happy to stipulate that the actual grammar advice in S&W is of little value, but as an advertisement for simple, economical English it’s clearly had an impact.
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The difference is that the terminology of mathematics and science is 1) actually defined 2) needed because there are often no words in normal language to describe sets, genes, atoms and particles. That generally isn’t the case in fields that deal with the human world we all know well. In these fields there isn’t a real justification to not simply write in normal language. I’m reminded of King Friday the 13th on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, who thought he was being eloquent by singing “row, row, row, your boat” as “Propel propel propel your craft/Gently down liquid solution/Ecstatically ecstatically ecstatically ecstatically/Existence is but an illusion”.
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Hmm. Okay, what’s your simple one word replacement for say, cultural capital? How about hegemony? Or, subjectivity? Or ontology? Or habitus?
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Can you define those in the manner you mean them as? Several of those actually have commonly accepted meanings but I suspect that isn’t what you mean by them. “Hegemony” is a term referring to the type of imperialism common in ancient Greece, but unless you are referring to that, “imperialism” is a simpler and better word. “Ontology” is a perfectly cromulent scientific word, referring to a nested classification scheme. The Dewey Decimal System is probably the best known ontology, but there are things like the Gene Ontology which are used to classify genes and their functions.
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I can, but that would take too much time and space. And anyway, my point would be the same you just made, that they have certain meanings in certain contexts, in this case, humanities scholarship. They’re like shortcuts, or shorthand, to those complex, particular meanings.
So the question to you is, why shouldn’t humanities scholars use them when writing for a particular audience that can be expected to know them? Why should they instead use many more ordinary words, when you apparently don’t expect STEM scholars to do so instead of using their own specialized shorthand terms? Is it really just because humanities scholars are writing about “the world we all know well”?
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But are there really concepts needing such terms in non-technical fields? I have to wonder if a lot of this is just science-envy – a description of society or history written in common language doesn’t look as impressive as a scientific paper full of equations and odd terms. The humanities should pride themselves that their work is more accessible to the public than that of science – not try to needlessly obscure it.
This is one of those useless tautologies that Pullum was talking about. Yes, if it were needless, it would be bad.
The point is that they are not needless, they are communicating something.
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My question was narrower, but you wrote interesting things and might have answered it in passing.
So I take it that you have not noticed any trend among postmodern academics, when talking among themselves, to value the artistic value of their use of language beyond the pure utility of using language. Which is the phenomenon I’ve observed among the “traditional branches” of the humanities in Austria.
As a second-language speaker of English, I must say that the “best verbs” don’t make a text clearer than well-chosen adjectives; in fact, this writing style requires a greater knowledge of vocabulary from the reader. Adverb + general verb conveys the basic meaning even to people who are unfamiliar with the particular exotic adverb.
What I find particularly curious about the “don’t use adverbs, find the best verb” advice that it runs contrary to other writing advice that seems to be popular in the English speaking world. They tell you to write short sentences, to spread the meaning across two sentences rather than cram it into a single more complex one. They tell you to prefer simple words to “big” words. In short, they tell you to keep things simple rather than compact, and to not use every single feature of the language.
And then they turn around and tell you to use the ridiculously big verb vocabulary of the English language to its fullest in order to concentrate all the meaning into one word, rather than expressing it in a more pedestrian fashion with a verb and an adverb.
I find that when translating from German to English, I have to change a lot of passive constructions to active in order to make it sound right again. I also have to replace nouns by verbs. But there is nothing fundamentally different about the grammars of the two languages, it’s just the customary style. If I translate a scientific text from German to English without “adjusting” for the style differences, I end up with perfectly grammatical but incredibly clunky English. If I go from English to German, I end up with perfectly grammatical German that sounds like it was written by an elementary school kid on the topic of “what I did during the summer”.
So, this leads me to the question, why is using active voice considered better style in English? Maybe the only reason why active voice sounds clearer in English is that passive voice has been underused due to being consistently discouraged in style guides?
Yes, there are.
There is a constant danger of obscuring arguments with that, because short-hands for concepts in those fields tend to automatically also serve as short-hands for arguments, but spelling everything out every time quickly gets cumbersome.
Two examples:
- Preemptive war is much easier to argue for in English than it is in German because the term “appeasement” for Chamberlain’s policy towards Hitler is well-known, while the term has only recently been imported into German and remains less well-known.
- It is easier to make a case against private gun ownership in German because your audience is more likely to be familiar with the concept o the “state monopoly on the use of violence” (compactly expressed as “Gewaltmonopol”)…
So yes, the humanities have the same legitimate need for obscure short-hand terms and concepts as the sciences do; but I think it’s much easier to abuse these short-hand terms to make an unsound argument.
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Why should work they do for each other be more accessible to the public? (And as others are helpfully explaining here, what strikes you as obscurity is not “needless”; as in the sciences, specialized terminology among specialists in the humanities does serve a purpose.)
I know the concept of a public intellectual is a faded one these days, but many humanities scholars do convey the insights they come up with amongst each other to the public, and they pretty much do so in lay terms. Just as some science researchers do.
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Assuming it is not dense and hard to parse as a cover for not actually having any ideas. A lot of that stuff deserves the reputation it has. The subcultures encourages jargonification over clarity.
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Many governmental research organizations even mandate that their researchers devote part of their time to communicate about their work for the general public.
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Oh, I’ve seen both. I’m in history, and most historians tend to be less jargony than other fields. We most certainly will use postmodern ideas and often languages, but we tend towards clarity most times. There are certainly cases where I think people are using postmodernism as a means to cover up for their lack of good ideas. But I’ve also seen cases where people are using postmodernism in a way that enhances our understanding of whatever their topic is. Of course everyone wants to write pretty, but especially when it comes to dissertation, there are traditions you’re expected to show you’ve mastered. I do think though that we’re often more interested in writing for larger audiences than just other historians.
I do have a colleague who is into that sort of intellectually wankery, but his work tends to be pretty solidly built and not too jargony.
Is that more clear?
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I don’t know. Of all the humanities field, I think mine is the one that is most interested more recently in writing for larger audience. I personally want to write for the public, because I think history is important for people, especially people who have the privilege of being able to rewrite or ignore history altogether. I do agree that we often write for each other more than the public, but we absolutely need to make the case for history as a public good more forcefully. Graduate programs aimed at widening our career options (outside of academia, the archives, and museums) would certainly help. But maybe classes that speak to different kinds of writing would also help… you can cover writing for newspapers, magazines, blogs, popular history, to go along with writing our dissertations.
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Note: I’m a technical writer, so I deal with grammar every day.
“Elements of Style” isn’t horrible, but it is outdated. Grammar, punctuation, and writing standards are a lot more complicated that EoS makes them out to be. In addition, I criticize the book because it’s not about style, it’s mostly about grammar. Style is fundamentally different.
Many technical writers obsess about grammar, perhaps because they see horrible usage in the real world. When I see bad grammar or punctuation, I laugh. English is, and always has been, a bendable language. If you’re writing fiction, go bend it. If you’re writing non-fiction, remember that the common grammar and punctuation rules help improve your writing.
Don’t mistake the rules for the goal. Your goal is communication with impact. The rules help you achieve that.
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Imagine a public sphere (ha, hullo Jurgen!) that actively encourages participation by credentialed intellectuals, instead of derisive suspicion. Wouldn’t it be nice! And good for people in general, too. Sigh
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