Death to Strunk and White

If you're like me, probably the one bit of grammatical instruction you got in college was an assignment to purchase and read Strunk and White's Elements of Style. This turns out to be a major mistake. As linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum puts it, "its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense." He characterizes the stylistic advice as "mostly harmless". Consider such classics as "omit needless words" or "be clear". This advice isn't bad, but it begs the important questions - what is clear? which words are needless? If it encourages you to go back over essays to look for unclear sections or overly wordy ones, great. But it doesn't show you how to do this.

Worse, however, is its grammatical advice which is often just plain wrong. Claims like the passive voice is bad, put statements in postive form, write with nouns and verbs, keep related words together, don't split infinitives, use the singular verb with none, or don't start sentences with however turn out to be at best misleading and at worst completely wrong. To prove it, just search for examples of these sins in the best writers of the past - say, Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain. Or actually just search through Strunk and White's own book because they constantly violate their own rules.

If a professor nevertheless insists on Strunk and White, send them these links to Professor Pullum's work where he debunks their work. Or invite Prof. Pullum to your university for a talk on these issues. And what to use instead? I've profited from Joseph Williams' Style which seems to me based on clearer principles and actually shows you how to construct a clear and elegant sentence, paragraph, and essay. I'll keep an eye out for Prof. Pullum's recommendations.