Saturday, April 25, 2009

A Super Yankee Bet On "The Little Book"!

In this blogger's callow undergraduate years at "The Harvard of the West," he studied English composition under Professor Robert Richards. One of the texts in the course was a little, orange-covered paperback that still molders in this blogger's bookcase: The Elements of Style by Willaim Strunk, Jr. with Revisions, and Introduction, and a New Chapter on Writing by E.(lwyn) B.(rooks) White (1959). In his introduction, White wrote

...I think, though, that if I suddenly found myself... facing a class in English usage and style, I would simply lean far out over the desk, clutch my lapels, blink my eyes, and say, "get the little book! Get the little book! Get the little book!

Today, this blogger is clutching his virtual lapels, blinking his virtual eyes, and saying, "Get the little blog! Get the little blog! Get the little blog!" If this is (fair & balanced) desperation, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Happy Birthday, Strunk And White!
By The Editors

(Photo: Kevin Rivoli/Associated Press) E.B. White’s original
typewriter and manuscript are pictured with William Strunk
Jr.’s original version and the 1959 edition of "the little book".


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The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White has been released in a 50th anniversary edition. Prized for its focus on clear, concise language, this famous “little book” has been a source of guidance for writers, copy editors and college students for half a century.

But are its rules the be all and end all of writing?

[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]

[1] Geoffrey K. Pullum — professor of general linguistics and head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, is a co-author with Rodney Huddleston of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

[2] Patricia T. O’Conner — author of the grammar guide Woe Is I and other books on language, including the new Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language,” written with Stewart Kellerman. She and Mr. Kellerman have a language Web site and blog at grammarphobia.com.

[3] Stephen Dodson — an editor who also blogs at a site he calls Language Hat and deals with many issues of a linguistic flavor

[4] Ben Yagoda — professor of English at the University of Delaware, is the author of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, and the forthcoming Memoir: A History.

[5] Mignon Fogarty — creator of the Grammar Girl podcast and author of Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.

[1]Back To Directory
A Disservice to All
By Geoffrey K. Pullum

The anodyne style advice that Strunk and White offer is harmless enough. I’m as ready as the next guy to “be clear” and “omit needless words.” But the uninformed grammar rules offered in “The Elements of Style” are a different matter.

Again and again, Strunk and White recommend the stuffy and unidiomatic, and warn against what sounds effective and natural.

The simplistic don’t-do-this, don’t-write-that instructions offered in the book would not guarantee good writing if they were obeyed. Indeed, they are often violated in the very paragraphs that Strunk and White use to present them. The section warning against the passive, for example, is replete with passives. (And anyway, the passive is a perfectly useful and respectable type of clause; there is no merit in blanket warnings against it.)

Some of the commands would be all but impossible to follow: “Write with nouns and verbs,” for example. No one avoids all use of adjectives and adverbs. Certainly not Strunk and White.

Above all, the book’s edicts contradict educated literary usage, even that of books published when Strunk was young and White was a baby.

“None of us are perfect” is not a grammar mistake; nor was it a century ago.

“Everybody brought their own” was good standard English for Jane Austen, and so it is today in the hands of any expert user of the language.

And I don’t know how anyone can seriously accept that we should write: “The culprit, it turned out, was he.”

Again and again, Strunk and White recommend the stuffy and unidiomatic, and warn against what sounds effective and natural. Even their beliefs about English as it used to be are wrong; but foisting their prejudices on today’s students is much more so. Pointless nagging about mythical shibboleths brings grammar instruction into disrepute. It makes students nervous without teaching them about sentence structure. That is a disservice to education.
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We’ve Moved On
By Patricia T. O’Conner

Rereading Strunk and White on its 50th birthday is like meeting an old lover and realizing how much you’ve outgrown him. Things have changed, little book, and you have not, or not enough.

Oh, the first 14 pages are still the gospel truth. And I still love the things I loved most — the “Elementary Principles of Composition” and the reminders at the end of the book. Any young person prone to getting tattoos might consider having a few of these permanently engraved where they can readily be seen: Omit needless words. Use concrete language. Be clear. Avoid fancy words. Revise and rewrite. Pure gold.

The first 14 pages are still the gospel truth, but much of the grammar and usage advice in the rest of the book is baloney.

But much of the grammar and usage advice in the rest of the book is baloney, to use a good concrete word. “He” has not been the default pronoun for both genders since “the beginnings of the English language” (only since the mid-18th century). Nobody these days uses “shall” instead of “will” in the first-person future tense.

The advice on “data” and “media” is outdated, as is some of the stuff about verbs. I see nothing wrong — and neither does Merriam-Webster’s — with “loan” or “state” as verbs, or “fix” to mean mend, or “gotten” as a participle for “get.” Nor am I losing sleep over “certainly” and “prestigious” and “offputting.”

Finally, “six persons” is not better than “six people.” Show me a guy who invariably says “six persons” and I will show you a fathead. But Happy Birthday anyway, Strunk and White.
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I’m Moving On
By Stephen Dodson.

I have been attacking Strunk and White for many years. On my blog, I have called it “that mangiest of stuffed owls,” “the bible of those who want to sneer at other people’s use of language without bothering to actually learn something about it themselves” and a “malign little compendium of bad advice.”

But in the comment thread to my latest Strunk-bashing post, a reader said he had “close to zero knowledge of linguistics” but was “fascinated by the arguments” for and against the book,” and he quite admirably followed up by acquiring a copy and reading it. He then came back to review it, saying:

The rules are short on explanation, background, detail and useful context. So, the book is not the elegant historic relic I hoped for; nor is it an evil, nasty little mindrotter. Either would have been worth the price. I suppose you would have to live with the constant praise of the thing (like Tolstoy with Shakespeare) to get decently angry about it. There are better things to be angry about: like an education system that has college kids unable to write a decent essay, and that turns for a remedy to this inadequate work.

I found that I agreed with him. As I said in my reply, “it’s not evil (though Geoffrey K. Pullum, a co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, likes to talk as if it were), just undercooked and overpraised.” I told him that the reason some of us express what may seem excessive anger about it is precisely that we “have to live with the constant praise of the thing.”

If people would stop touting it as the Indispensable Book and using it as a weapon, we wouldn’t have to annoy them with our attacks.
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A Matter of Style
By Ben Yagoda

The Elements of Style is a strange little book. Part of the strangeness is its ever-shifting use of the word “style.” In chapter one, “Elementary Rules of Usage,” we’re in the regulatory world of The Chicago Manual of Style: a set of (only!) 11 rules for the use of English words and punctuation. For example, we are told to put a comma after the “white” in “red, white, and blue.” It’s hard to refute that, but one wonders why it deserves nearly half of one of the book’s fewer than 100 pages.

In the second chapter, “Principles of Composition,” the conception of style broadens a bit, to mean something like propriety and effectiveness. “Use the active voice,” the reader is advised. “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” “In summaries, keep to one tense.” Again, most of the positions are difficult to dispute, and again, it is hard to figure out why these particular 22 principles were selected.

Broader still is the final chapter, “An Approach to Style,” written by E.B. White himself. He offers a list of guidelines, including “Place yourself in the background,” “Do not affect a breezy manner” and “Do not inject opinion.” “The approach to style,” he concludes, “is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.”

White purports to be talking about “style” but is really advocating a particular style. It is a style of absence: absence of grammatical mistakes, breeziness, opinions, jargon, clichés, mixed metaphors, wordiness and, indeed, anything that could cloud the transparency of the prose and remind readers that a real person composed it.

And that is the strangest thing of all. If you are writing about something that’s important to you, why should you want to disappear? E.B. White himself certainly never retreated to the background. His prose style is orderly, to be sure, but it only seems to be plain, simple and sincere. Anyone who has paid attention knows that it’s actually opinionated, thorny, idiosyncratic and unmistakable!
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Rules Are Meant to be Broken
By Mignon Fogarty

If “Strunk and White” were a movie, it would be a blockbuster, but I find its hallowed status disturbing. White seemed to share this concern and later wrote, “I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.” In an apparent attempt to temper Strunk’s commanding book sections, White’s introduction spends a lot of ink providing anecdotes that humanize Strunk, yet undermine his credibility.

Too many people seem not to have read the introduction.

English is a messy language. Wishing there were hard and fast rules doesn’t make it so.

White notes that Strunk valued boldness and felt it was “worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.” These characteristics led Strunk to state his style preferences as though they were rules. “He had a number of likes and dislikes that were almost as whimsical as the choice of a necktie, yet he made them seem utterly convincing,” wrote White.

White acknowledged that their book was just one voice. For example, of the possessive “s” at the end of “Charles’s,” White says, “Style rules of this sort are, of course, somewhat a matter of individual preference, and even the established rules of grammar are open to challenge.”

White believed that boldness was perhaps the book’s most distinguishing mark. The boldness of ignoring style choices makes “Strunk and White” easy to teach and easy to follow. It’s easier to write quizzes about rules than options, and it’s easier to memorize rules than options, but English is a messy language. Wishing there were hard-and-fast rules doesn’t make it so.

“Strunk and White” is a useful book, but it shouldn’t be the only book you ever consult, and “Strunk and White said so” is not a sure-fire defense in a style argument. ♥

[Andrew Rosenthal, Editor, chairs The Editorial Board of The New York Times. Rosenthal joined The Times in 1987, Prior to this employment, Rosenthal worked at the Associated Press, where he served as Moscow bureau chief. Rosenthal graduated from the University of Denver with a B.A. degree in American history.]


Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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A Nation Of Dirty Harrys & Dirty Harriettes — "Make My Day"!

Angry Bob doesn't like blasé, especially when it comes to guns in our midst. He would go nuts in Texas right now because the wingnuts in the House of Representatives, currently in session, want to rescind the banning of firearms on college campuses in the Lone Star State. Their feverish reasoning is that if a gunman appears in a college classroom, hellbent on killing as many people as possible, that gunman will be gunned down in a righteous classroom firefight by students with firearms in their bookbags. That makes sense to a lot of Texans. While they're at it, why don't the Texas wingnuts require the substituion of gasoline for water in fighting fires? So, the answer to gun violence is MORE GUNS! Brilliant (as the pitchman shouted in the old Guinness commercials)! If this is (fair & balanced) insanity, so be it.

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"Don't Take Your Guns To Town"
By U2 (a tribute to Johnny Ash)

[x NY Fishwrap]
A Culture Soaked In Blood
By Bob Herbert

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Guns.

Philip Markoff, a medical student, supposedly carried his semiautomatic in a hollowed-out volume of “Gray’s Anatomy.” Police believe he used it in a hotel room in Boston last week to murder Julissa Brisman, a 26-year-old woman who had advertised her services as a masseuse on Craigslist.

In Palm Harbor, FL, a 12-year-old boy named Jacob Larson came across a gun in the family home that, according to police, his parents had forgotten they had. Jacob shot himself in the head and is in a coma, police said. Authorities believe the shooting was accidental.

There is no way to overstate the horror of gun violence in America. Roughly 16,000 to 17,000 Americans are murdered every year, and more than 12,000 of them, on average, are shot to death. This is an insanely violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by the widespread availability of guns.

When the music producer Phil Spector decided, for whatever reason, to kill the actress, Lana Clarkson, all he had to do was reach for his gun — one of the 283 million privately owned firearms that are out there. When John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, went on a killing spree that took 10 lives in the Washington area, the absolute least of their worries was how to get a semiautomatic rifle that fit their deadly mission.

We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.

There were ceremonies marking the recent 10th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, but very few people remember a mass murder just five months after Columbine, when a man with a semiautomatic handgun opened fire on congregants praying in a Baptist church in Fort Worth. Eight people died, including the gunman, who shot himself.

A little more than a year before the Columbine killings, two boys with high-powered rifles killed a teacher and four little girls at a school in Jonesboro, AR. That’s not widely remembered either. When something is as pervasive as gun violence in the U.S., which is as common as baseball in the summertime, it’s very hard for individual cases to remain in the public mind.

Homicides are only a part of the story.

While more than 12,000 people are murdered with guns annually, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (using the latest available data) tells us that more than 30,000 people are killed over the course of one typical year by guns. That includes 17,000 who commit suicide, nearly 800 who are killed in accidental shootings and more than 300 killed by the police. (In many of the law enforcement shootings, the police officers are reacting to people armed with guns).

And then there are the people who are shot but don’t die. Nearly 70,000 fall into that category in a typical year, including 48,000 who are criminally attacked, 4,200 who survive a suicide attempt, more than 15,000 who are shot accidentally, and more than 1,000 — many with a gun in possession — who are shot by the police.

The medical cost of treating gunshot wounds in the U.S. is estimated to be well more than $2 billion annually. And the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays.

The toll on children and teenagers is particularly heartbreaking. According to the Brady Campaign, more than 3,000 kids are shot to death in a typical year. More than 1,900 are murdered, more than 800 commit suicide, about 170 are killed accidentally and 20 or so are killed by the police.

Another 17,000 are shot but survive.

I remember writing from Chicago two years ago about the nearly three dozen public school youngsters who were shot to death in a variety of circumstances around the city over the course of just one school year. Arne Duncan, who was then the chief of the Chicago schools and is now the U.S. secretary of education, said to me at the time: “That’s more than a kid every two weeks. Think about that.”

Actually, that’s our problem. We don’t really think about it. If the crime is horrible enough, we’ll go through the motions of public anguish but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood.

This blasé attitude, this willful refusal to acknowledge the scope of the horror, leaves the gun nuts free to press their crazy case for more and more guns in ever more hands. They’re committed to keeping the killing easy, and we should be committed for not stopping them. ♥

[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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