The Elements of (not so good) Style

[Baron Kurtz]

OK, i've just read the article through clearly. The author seems not to have a gripe really with Strunck and White. All of his examples are really gripes against bad writers and their inability to understand the advice in Strunck and White.


After all his rambling incoherence against the "passive voice" advice given in Stunck and White he says this:

"After this unpromising start, there is some fairly sensible style advice: The authors explicitly say they do not mean "that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice," which is "frequently convenient and sometimes necessary." They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.

Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle everything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word's grammar checker underlines every passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That over-interpretation is part of the damage that Strunck and White have unintentionally done. But it is not what I am most concerned about here."

The problem he has is with language tutors or graders, not with Strunck and White.


His article is, errr, stupid.

bk

 

[Baron Kurtz]

Okay, so John Cage comes along and says to hell with scales and timing and whatnot, I'm just going to create music that doesn't follow the rules. And he did, and that's great, but what would we have if all musicians said the same thing? Would there be any more melodies? Would there be any more form? That, I believe, is a fair equivalent to the prevalence of writers today who aren't disregarding the rules but aren't even bothering to learn them.

You'd have free jazz.

That's just the thing: who is to say it's wrong if a so-called expert isn't going to follow the rules?

There are of course many people who use this argument to say "anything goes".

As has been eluded to, language is like fashion. It is one thing to learn the rules and then bend or break them with style, creativity, and a sense of whimsy. It is another to say, "The rules are rubbish" and then break the most basic of them with no consideration except forwarding your personal agenda.

The essential difference between well crafted writing which breaks the rules, and illiteracy. There's a guy i know who fancies himself a writer - he's one of those people who actually believe the myths of Jack Kerouac's non-editing lol - who never learned the rules because "that's just the man trying to make you conform". His writing, though prolific (and unsurprisingly unpublished), is entirely unreadable because of the the most basic grammatical and spelling errors. How he got through college is beyond me. But then, i've graded college term papers (and given them passing grades) which had the writing of a five-year-old. I was not allowed to remove points for lack of clarity. "If you kind of know what they mean, give 'em the points" was the instruction. If people are never corrected, how will they ever learn?

bk

 

[Senator Jack]

Posted by BK:
A full - and independent - sentence. In this case the writer is right, but it is often done wrongly. This example really does need the extended space created by a period. It doesn't flow correctly or with any effect with only a space.

Okay, I just got up and dug into the OE Grammar chapter on parentheses, and I stand corrected. Its last example was a parenthetical following a full stop. You're right, though, about the example not flowing with the passage, and that's why I demanded a recasting. In fact, going over the article again, I feel he makes far too much use of parentheticals throughout.

I would take more umbrage with his placement of the commas within the quotations.

I also (or idiomatically, me too). Once upon a time, I believe italics would have been used in such a case. I seem to see that a lot in old periodicals.

Ex. For me to report that I paid my bill by saying the bill was paid by me, with no stress on me...

While I agree with many of the points the author makes, I believe the tone of the article allows for poor writers to continue making that 'to hell with the rules' claim.

Now, how about that Oxford comma? It's dearth these days is really starting to make me nuts.

Regards,

Jack

 

[Baron Kurtz]

You see it (Serial/Oxford comma) more in the UK. In fact it's the way was taught to list when semi-colons weren't appropriate. I unlearned that when i moved to the US.

sort of: fftopic:

The current vogue in academic journals is to remove all hyphenation. So, as a very simple example, co-ordinate loses its hyphon. This makes for some truly abominable words, as you can all imagine. But then academic journals have also led us to the pass of simply adding -ize, -ized, -ization, -izability. From my field, to make a membrane permeable is to "permeabilize" it, "the membrane was permeabilized", "membrane permeabilization was carried out using …", "permeabilizability was reduced …". The funny thing is that they have not extended from permeable, they have started from permeability. Weird.

bk

 

[Senator Jack]

That loss of the hyphen irritates me as well. In older tomes, you find words such as coördinate and reënter with the diaeresis, and I prefer that orthography. To me, it simply reads better.

 

[reetpleat]

You'd have free jazz.



There are of course many people who use this argument to say "anything goes".




The essential difference between well crafted writing which breaks the rules, and illiteracy. There's a guy i know who fancies himself a writer - he's one of those people who actually believe the myths of Jack Kerouac's non-editing lol - who never learned the rules because "that's just the man trying to make you conform". His writing, though prolific (and unsurprisingly unpublished), is entirely unreadable because of the the most basic grammatical and spelling errors. How he got through college is beyond me. But then, i've graded college term papers (and given them passing grades) which had the writing of a five-year-old. I was not allowed to remove points for lack of clarity. "If you kind of know what they mean, give 'em the points" was the instruction. If people are never corrected, how will they ever learn?

bk

We must remember that the rules are not arbitrary. There is a reason for them, and it is communicating ideas clearly. Your friend needs to think more about the reader and less about the writer.

As for grading papers, i am torn. If the class is history, and the student displays a knowledge of the subject matter, he should get credit for it. if it is an english class, he should be expected to show a proficiency in english.

Still, no one is served by a teacher allowing poor writing. My instruction, were I a teacher, would be grade on the content, but mark, correct, or even ask for a rewrite if the language is not clear. I see no reason why a teacher can not be both a teacher of the subject and a teacher of english. It is that important. i suppose if they did their addition wrong, it would be reasonable to correct that too.

 

[Baron Kurtz]

Yes of course you're correct. Rules which may seem arbitrary are there to guide the language in a certain direction to make easier to understand. I guess since we've all lived in times when the language was "set" we've lost the feeling of how random t used to be. Read any Merriwether Lewis lately? Man, he was all over the place. Almost impossible to understand in some places. But so was Jefferson, and so was everyone until the middle 1800s or so. Like currency in the US, everyone had their own version of language. Formalisation led to an increase in legibility and the easier spread of ideas.

Re: term papers. My feeling was that one aspect of the game of being a scientist is to clearly convey your ideas to the reader. Therefore a tough grading early on would be beneficial.

Though the journals are badly sub-edited (or not at all), illiterate papers will not get accepted, and since the whole point of doing the experiments is to tell other people about them, a scientist had better be literate if they want a job …

bk

 

[reetpleat]

Yes of course you're correct. Rules which may seem arbitrary are there to guide the language in a certain direction to make easier to understand. I guess since we've all lived in times when the language was "set" we've lost the feeling of how random t used to be. Read any Merriwether Lewis lately? Man, he was all over the place. Almost impossible to understand in some places. But so was Jefferson, and so was everyone until the middle 1800s or so. Like currency in the US, everyone had their own version of language. Formalisation led to an increase in legibility and the easier spread of ideas.

Re: term papers. My feeling was that one aspect of the game of being a scientist is to clearly convey your ideas to the reader. Therefore a tough grading early on would be beneficial.

Though the journals are badly sub-edited (or not at all), illiterate papers will not get accepted, and since the whole point of doing the experiments is to tell other people about them, a scientist had better be literate if they want a job …

bk

I agree. It seems a teacher is doing a student a real disservice to not, one way or another, make them aware of the errors in their language, and help them correct them. As for grades, that is less important. But to just pass a student with no acknowledgment seems like poor academic practice.

 

[just_me]

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying "The bill was paid by me," with no stress on "me," would sound inane. (I'm the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.)

And here's another error I found in the writer's punctuation:

Parentheticals ought to come before the period. It should be:

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying "The bill was paid by me," with no stress on "me," would sound inane (I'm the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse).

And no, I'm not scrutinizing the article to be pedantic. These are glaring errors to me, and I'm not even a professional.

Sorry, but I think the writer was correct. The original sentence needed the period and the parenthetical phrase was a complete sentence and needed its own period.

 

[Senator Jack]

Yeah, I addressed that in the post above. In the light of day, and after going through the OEG, I retracted that charge. Again, I still think the passage needed to be recast.

Regards,

Jack

 

[just_me]

Yeah, I addressed that in the post above. In the light of day, and after going through the OEG, I retracted that charge. Again, I still think the passage needed to be recast.

Regards,

Jack

I finally caught up to that post.

 

[Senator Jack]

And you thought you were pedantic...

http://clairelight.typepad.com/seelight/2006/03/strunk_and_ligh.html

While I admire the author's war on cliches (is that a cliche?), I think if she had her way, literature would be stripped of all those charmingly archaic nuances that I love. Don't use don or doff or wend or proffer? Don't use save for except? It's a cliche to find yourself somewhere? With my head full of life's puzzles, I often wander the city till I find myself somewhere. What a queer duck.


Regards,

Jack

 

[Paisley]

^

"...it takes the generality of writers forever..."

Isn't "takes forever" a cliche?

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars"?

I think the metaphor comparing clothing accessories to words is something a lot of her male readers probably can't relate to.

I'd continue, but I have a lot to do today.

 

[Bourbon Guy]

Dumb article. Rules of grammar are nothing like fashion or music. Language, when communicating specific thoughts and information as opposed to evoking emotion, must follow specific, generally accepted, and inviolable rules of grammar, syntax, and spelling. When it doesn't it fails in its porpoise. It is very much like conventions in mathematics. "+224=" doesn't really get you there, now does it?

 

[Feng_Li]

And you thought you were pedantic...

http://clairelight.typepad.com/seelight/2006/03/strunk_and_ligh.html

While I admire the author's war on cliches (is that a cliche?), I think if she had her way, literature would be stripped of all those charmingly archaic nuances that I love. Don't use don or doff or wend or proffer? Don't use save for except? It's a cliche to find yourself somewhere? With my head full of life's puzzles, I often wander the city till I find myself somewhere. What a queer duck.

Orwell had the best take on the topic:

Staleness of imagery...[occurs when] The writer...is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not....The concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

From Politics and the English Language, which more students should read.

 

[Feng_Li]

Dumb article. Rules of grammar are nothing like fashion or music. Language, when communicating specific thoughts and information as opposed to evoking emotion, must follow specific, generally accepted, and inviolable rules of grammar, syntax, and spelling. When it doesn't it fails in its porpoise. It is very much like conventions in mathematics. "+224=" doesn't really get you there, now does it?

Tongue slightly in cheek, I would point out that there are multiple agreed conventions in mathematics, as in language. "+ 2 2 4 =" may not work, but "+ 2 2" would be a perfectly valid example of Prefix notation. Similarly, "2 2 +" would also work, and "6 2 2 * +" can get you 10. It merely depends which system one is using.

 

[Miss 1929]

If you follow their advice...

Omit needless words
Avoid passive voice
Use nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs
Lose the commas

You get Ernest Hemingway.

And we already have Ernest Hemingway.

I mean, I like Hemingway, but it's not for everyone. It is not particularly pretty.