Cockeyed Optimist

On the excellent Blog ‘Daily Writing Tips’ for August 27, Maeve Maddox, one of the gurus behind this enterprise, gives a useful summary of Strunk and White’s ‘Elements of Style’, which has been a helpful guide for writers since 1918.

As an editor, I have my own copy, of course; not the most recent edition, but that hardly matters. The English language evolves, but this evolution is mainly seen in its effect on vocabulary and usage, while Strunk and White has broader concerns.

The reason I’m posting about it today is not to describe what’s in the book — Maeve Maddox has done this thoroughly. What I wanted to do is point out that it is very important to approach this guide with caution. You shouldn’t think of it as a set of laws or binding rules, or you could find yourself becoming rigid in your writing.

Here is a quotation from Geoffrey K. Pullum, writing at one of my favourite blogs, Language Log,

“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs” says E. B. White in the chapter he added in making the new 1957 edition of Strunk’s odious booklet The Elements of Style, most of which was written some time before the First World War. Ridiculous advice, which nobody follows — not White himself, for example, as I pointed out in my earlier post “Those who take the adjectives from the table.” Everybody uses adjectives. Anybody who wants to say they are not useful has a real problem: useful is an adjective, so how are they going to express the claim?

We have already seen something very closely related: the case of the student I met who had been told by a Los Angeles teacher of English that everything that is optional is forbidden: again the basis for this nonsense comes from Strunk and White (and from Strunk’s original version, in fact): the “Omit needless words” mantra. The student quoted above appears to think that all adjectives are needless (you can get your point across without them) and that is why they are and ought to be, by Strunk’s principles and not just White’s, forbidden. For if adjectives are needless, then if you use them you must be using them too much, by a factor of infinity, and as Arnold Zwicky has pointed out, a guiding principle of prescriptivism seems to be that If they do it too much, they should be told not to do it at all.

This poor student has apparently been told by some other professor to purchase Strunk and White (sometimes parents give their children copies of Strunk and White to take off to college, a practice I believe constitutes child abuse), and she has read it, and has believed the things it says.

Now, maybe Geoffrey Pullum is going overboard a bit here, but nevertheless his point is absolutely apposite. As in many another sphere of life, those who slavishly follow a set of rules are doomed to have them, sooner or later, turn round and bite them.

So, go ahead and use Strunk and White; especially if you are a student — but take what it says as a guide, not as a strict prescription. If you want to end a sentence with a preposition, you should be allowed to. If you want to purposely split an infinitive, go ahead. But if you want to find out about the elementary rules of usage or composition, then by all means read Strunk and White.

As Maeve Maddox tells us, you can find an on-line version at Bartleby.com

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