Debunking Strunk and White?

For the past 50 years, “The Elements of Style” has served as the de facto Holy Writ for writers, teachers and students on matters of grammar, usage and style. With 10 million copies sold in the last half-century, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s enduring classic is deserving of a golden anniversary ”celebration” and the accompanying hype. Or is it?

In the last week or so (April 16 was the anniversary of its publication), the book—now available in a 50th Anniversary Edition—has been revisited and featured  just about everywhere, from major newspapers to minor blogs. The praise heaped on the “little book” since 1959, in widely read reviews and by well-known writers, has helped cement it as the unquestioned, unchallenged authority on issues concerning linguistics.

I, like most other writers I know or have read, have always accepted Struck and White’s dictatorial regime without serious interrogation. I own a copy, tucked among dozens of other writing books. Spurred by all the renewed hype, I pulled it off the shelf. No dog-eared pages, no marks in the margins, no highlighted sections. I realized I never really made a connection with the revered guide the way so many others obviously have over the years. To be sure, it has served as a useful reference at various points during several writing projects. To be sure, its principles and rules have been drilled home throughout my education, as I’m certain that it has guided many of my teachers. 

Many of the writers who routinely extol “The Elements of Style” also regularly disregard its prescriptions. Sam Roberts of the New York Times quotes writer Roger Rosenblatt in his article about the book’s 50th anniversary as saying, “you really ought to know the rules before you break them.” A reasonable maxim, I thought.

Unless, of course, you think the rules shouldn’t be the rules in the first place. Enter Geoffrey Pullum. Head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, he certainly won’t be celebrating the ballyhooed anniversary. His scathing criticism, published last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, of so-called writer’s bible amounts to sacrilege in the minds of many Strunk and White adherents.

“The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates,” Pullum writes. “Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.”

He’s easier on the style sections of the book, calling them “mostly harmless, “vapid” and “useless.” As Pullum points out, much of the “The Elements of Style” concerns grammar,

…and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious. Since today it provides just about all of the grammar instruction most Americans ever get, that is something of a tragedy.

He proceeds to lay out his analysis point by point: an unwarranted bias against the passive voice (only made worse by the fact that the authors are “so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t”); almost immediately breaking the rules they just set out (he provides a few laughable examples); and making false claims, a result of basing “their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage,” (avoiding split infinitives, not starting sentences with “however,” using the singular verb with “none,” the which-that debate).

“It’s sad,” Pullum concludes:

Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write ‘however’ or ‘than me’ or ‘was’ or ‘which,’ but can’t tell you why.

Roberts, from the very beginning of—and throughout—his piece in the Times, unwittingly proves Pullum’s point, posing parenthetical questions about whether he is correctly adhering to the rules of “The Elements of Style”: “Is posing a question the same as using the passive voice?”; “upper case?”; “a proper way to begin a sentence?” after beginning with the word “however”; and so on.

As he indicated during his appearance on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week, Pullum has received scores of harsh e-mails attacking him for his appraisal, or reevaluation, of the once seemingly irreproachable “little book.” Instead, his eye-opening critique should serve as a launching pad for serious debate and discussion about its accuracy, correctness and value. (Check out the Room for Debate blog, where several linguists and grammarians weigh in on the matter.)

I’m not exactly ready to shred, torch or trash my copy; it’ll remain where it always has, tucked away on my shelf of writing books. However, I would alter Dorothy Parker’s wonderful quote, cited by Roberts in his article, replacing “The Elements of Style” with a slightly younger title: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘On Writing Well.’ The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”