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.

Going to graduate school

One of the chapters of the book describes the decision to go to grad school and particularly to a PhD program. My advice was short because I wasn't sure how many people would be interested, so I thought that I would link to a few more comprehensive guides.

Tim Burke's "Should You Go to Grad School"
Fontana Lab's "It's Six Years of Love and Music, Man"
Fabio Rojas's "Grad School Rulz"
Eszter Hargittai's "Ph.Do"

Kieran Healy sums it all up like this: "In academic environments, expectations are high and monitoring is low (but decisive when it happens). Many grad-student pathologies spring from a failure to deal with this problem."

Why so many liberal professors?

In the book, I mentioned how liberal the professoriate is and how that might affect your education. Some new research suggests just why the professoriate is so liberal. It claims that just as few men go into nursing because it is perceived as an occupation for women, so is academic life typecast as a place for liberals and hence unattractive to conservatives. You can find more details here, but the research leads to this interesting conclusion: “the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”

There's a lie in my lecture

A great post about a professor who always includes one lie in his lectures and it is up to students to spot it. I will have to use this next semester.

Advice from elsewhere

I like to scour the web for the advice that other professors are giving their students. The Yale political scientist/economist Chris Blattman has a nice set of ten tips that he recommends to undergraduates interested in public affairs. I would second his recommendation to get a good foundation in statistics and mathematical modeling. It really is essential for working in public affairs. I noticed that he is a little less supportive of language classes than I am both because immersion is the best way to learn a language (very true) and because there are lots of opportunties for learning languages outside of college (somewhat true - more true if you decide to live abroad).

Appreciative thinking

The Berkeley psychology professor Seth Roberts has an interesting post on what he calls appreciative thinking (in contrast to critical thinking). He worries that students are too inculcated with the tendency to tear apart any academic they receive, to find its flaws. He suggests instead that students be taught to first appreciate what the work achieves because just about any published piece has some worth.

This is a good point. In my first reading of a work, I always try to give the author the benefit of the doubt and give it my most generous reading. But I do have two quibbles with his worries. The first is that I think it applies more to graduate students than undergrads who are often too appreciative, assuming that if we assign a work then it must be both correct and important. Second, I think appreciation is a good first step but needs to be followed by criticism. Almost all academic work challenges the conclusions of some previous work. If we simply appreciate, then it is difficult to know what to believe. If two scholars disagree, then at least one of them has to wrong.