A Minuscule Pullum Miscellany
Oh, dear. Again and again and again, American professors with absolutely no background in English grammar insist that their 21st-century college students should study this unpleasantly dogmatic little work, written by men born in the 19th century. But the dictats given in The Elements of Style range from the redundant to the insane. Anyone who read the book again and again and again, and took its edicts literally, would do disastrous damage to their writing.
Most of those who dip into it come out with some signs of a nervous cluelessness about grammar: they get edgy around adverbs and prepositions and instances of the verb be, without exactly knowing why they feel like that, or what they should do about it.
I am quite convinced that The Elements of Style harms students more than it helps them. Yet the Google search term {Strunk White "Elements of Style" site:harvard.edu} calls up nearly ninety hits. Replacing harvard.edu by mit.edu yields more, about 140. At Princeton it's 23. At Stanford it's about 95. The finest universities in America continue to insist that this awful little compilation of century-old peevery is an important accessory for today's literate student. It isn't. The difference between carrying around The Elements of Style in your backpack and carrying around a slide rule is that slide rules gave accurate answers.
[excerpt from Geoffrey K. Pullum, "Worthless grammar edicts from Harvard", Language Log, 29 April 2010.]
For a manifestoish posting by Mr. Pullum on his campaign to dethrone Strunk & White's little book from its populist throne of prescriptivist strictures, I suggest: Geoffrey K. Pullum, "The campaign begins, at Brown", Language Log, 7 April 2010.]
Now, while on the subject of Geoffrey K. Pullum, I make bold enough to post an entire piece from Greg Ross' Futility Closet ("History Denied", 2 April 2010) that I have been waiting to share; I think the moment has arrived.
In 1997, University of Edinburgh linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum submitted the following letter to the Economist:
‘Connections needed’ (March 15) reports that Russia’s Transneft pipeline operator is not able to separate crude flows from different oil fields: ‘they all come out swirled into a single bland blend.’ This is quite true. And worse yet, the characterless, light-colored mix thus produced is concocted blindly, without quality oversight, surely a grave mistake. In fact, I do not recall ever encountering a blinder blander blonder blender blunder.
It “would have been a true first in natural language text,” Pullum wrote, “a grammatical and meaningful sequence of five consecutive words in a natural context that are differentiated from each other by just a single character.” Alas, the Economist chose not to print it.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Wednesday, 5 May 2010 at 02.33
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Never heard of Pullum before, but I enthusiastically support his dismissal of The Elements of Style and the way it's used. I also think there ought to be a special place in hell for people who insist on trying to teach English by diagramming sentences.
A good approach to teaching English grammar is this: Learn to read well and speak well, and you'll soon be able to write well.
on Wednesday, 5 May 2010 at 10.49
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I am continually amazed at the number of people who aspire to be writers–or worse, who call themselves "writers"–who are not avid readers.