

50 years of bad grammar advice - quoderat
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm

======
bbg
Pullum makes some good points -- his objection to the irrelevant distinction
between 'that' and 'which' is apt -- but I believe that his starkly
opinionated denunciation reeks of silly academic spleen and ultimately
mischaracterizes this concise, helpful, and even beautiful little book.

First, although Pullum inveighs against Strunk and White, he tends to direct
his barbs not toward the book itself, but toward writing teachers. For
example:

"Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle
everything that looks like a passive...."

This mode of criticism is rather like blaming the Bible for the sins of the
Inquisition -- you can do it, but your criticism falters right away by missing
the true target.

Where Pullum does criticize the book itself, he accuses it of harboring a
fussy and decontextualized view of language. Unfortunately, this very
criticism can be directed back at Pullum. For example, when he criticizes the
absence of a passive verb in this sentence:

"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground",

Pullum ignores Strunk and White's elegant and concise rephrase:

"Dead leaves covered the ground."

Here, "covered", an active, transitive verb taking the direct object "ground",
conveys vividly what the verbose and pale construction "were lying", coupled
with the prepositional phrase "on the ground", does not. Pullum's fussiness
about the meaning of the word "passive" obscures S&W's point: vividness and
brevity come together nicely in the active construction.

Pullum falls into an abyss of self-contradiction when he concludes Strunk and
White do not understand grammar:

"But despite the "Style" in the title, much in the book relates to 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."

Once again Pullum faults The Elements for the sins of its followers, not for
its own qualities. But what is most important here is that Pullum first argues
(implausibly) that The Elements is a grammar book, and then (incomprehensibly)
accuses S&W of having written about grammar when they should have confined
themselves to writing about style!

Finally, Pullum uncharitably criticizes The Elements as a "bunch of trivial
don't-do-this prescriptions." He ignores the fact that S&W explicitly
recommend that writers "Put statements in positive form" (section II.19), and
follow through on this prescription themselves when they recommend such
practices as: "Use definite, specific, concrete language," "Keep related words
together," and "Omit needless words."

(Pullum criticizes this last recommendation on the ground that it unhelpfully
fails to show which words are needless. Once again, Pullum fails to cite S&W's
paragraph-long discussion of the matter or to recognize that they offer over a
dozen illustrative examples.)

To be sure, the Elements is not a perfect book. For one thing, language is not
a static object admitting of a timeless description. Furthermore, I would not
argue that everyone should use The Elements as guiding light; "de gustibus non
disputandum," as Cicero said, about tastes there can be no argument (meaning
that tastes do not admit of rational arguments). So if you don't like the
book, fine. Still, Pullum's blinkered mischaracterization of the book serves
only to get him another publication in his CV, not to enlighten his
readership. Although I may be blinkered myself by having grown to love this
book in college, I wholeheartedly recommend it as one of the finest and most
timeless style manuals available.

~~~
cduan
Perhaps it's just me, but I've always found the that/which distinction fairly
clear and relevant. Consider the following two sentences:

1\. Don't eat the apples, which are rotten.

2\. Don't eat the apples that are rotten.

To me, the first one indicates that _all_ the apples are rotten, whereas the
second only suggests that some are bad and directs me to be choosy.

Of course, I know better than to assume that everyone follows this rule to the
letter, but I do make an effort to get it right myself (like a good protocol
implementor: liberal with input, strict with output).

~~~
gruseom
But you primed your first example with a disambiguating comma. A fairer
comparison would be:

1\. Don't eat the apples which are rotten.

2\. Don't eat the applies that are rotten.

#2 sounds better to me (especially for spoken English) but the difference in
meaning is not nearly as obvious.

~~~
jfarmer
I'd just say, "Don't eat the rotten apples." Or, "Don't eat the apples,
they're rotten."

------
pg
To pull something like this off convincingly, you have to write better than E.
B. White, which is pretty hard to do.

    
    
      The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous 
      esteem in which it is held by American college graduates.
    

Ug. What a clinker. He sounds like Hector Dexter.

And he's not even saying what he means to. Undergrads like the book too;
surely he's not deliberately excluding them? He should have just written:

    
    
      The Elements of Style doesn't deserve its reputation.

~~~
olavk
He argues that Whites grammar advice is factually wrong, and uses examples
from Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker to prove his point. That argument does not
depend on whether Pullum himself is a better writer that White.

But FWIW I find the first sentence much more informative than the second.

~~~
pg
I didn't say that his argument depends on it, just that it would be more
convincing if he wrote well.

If he understands something important about writing that E. B. White didn't,
he ought to be able to use that special insight to produce better results,
much as someone who claimed to have discovered the secret of making money
ought to be rich.

You're right that the first sentence is more informative. Among its other
problems, it's _too_ informative. It's like saying that pi is 3.27394 rather
than 3.14.

~~~
kubrick
_You're right that the first sentence is more informative. Among its other
problems, it's too informative. It's like saying that pi is 3.27394 rather
than 3.14._

Judgement call. "Too" informative? Perhaps for people who prefer brief
sentences. For god's sake, stay the hell away from Faulkner.

~~~
pg
It's not a judgement call whether pi is closer to 3.27394 or 3.14. It's almost
as certain Pullum didn't mean to exclude undergrads from his statement.

------
mattmaroon
"Many are useless, like "Omit needless words.""

Useless as instructions, perhaps, but highly useful as mantras. Much of
writing is editing/refactoring, in which case it's great to repeat to yourself
"omit needless words", "Be clear", and "Do not explain too much" as you do it.

------
mkyc
I credit the article for giving me cause to celebrate on this 16th, but all
past its thirteenth word is trash. The Elements of Style is an elegant book
that has improved both my writing and my programming. It will improve yours.
It would improve Pullum's, if he ever bothers to read it.

The meat isn't in the titles but rather in the content, the examples, and the
writing itself. "Do not inject _irrelevant_ opinion" makes a poor title. So
too does "Be alert for those needless words that you're bound to write". The
titles are just reminders. Don't read just the titles. Read the whole book.

The 4 sentences mentioned are not examples of passives. They are examples of
"there is" and "could be X" expressions that should be converted into a
forceful active voice. Read the book carefully.

Criticisms of teachers and universities are irrelevant. How often do students
read their texts carefully? Yet the book is short and clear. Don't get a
second-hand account - not from a teacher, not from a friend, not from me, and
certainly not from [this ignorant pedant] Pullum. Read the book yourself.

The book is a wonderful reference, too. Buy or borrow it and read it. Read it
three times.

~~~
barrkel
Interesting. In the reaction to this article, I see a lot of people betray
their emotional angst when their shibboleths are threatened.

~~~
mkyc
Angst is an emotion, so I'm not sure what you're saying. I think you're
calling the responses overblown in a fancy and covertly insulting way. You'd
be annoyed too if a carelessly inaccurate article caused people to avoid Lisp
or Why's Guide or whatever.

------
mdemare
The author is a regular contributor the the Language Log (recommended).

<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/>

------
dchest
Quote from the article:

\-----------------------

"What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a
pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a
passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to
show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of
the four are mistaken diagnoses. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be
heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are
all errors:

"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of
the passive in it anywhere."

What they wrote in the book:

\----------------------------

(section called "Use the active voice", after examples of passive voice)

The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing.
This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in
writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be
made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for
such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.

    
    
       There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.
    
       Dead leaves covered the ground.
    

(link: <http://tinyurl.com/cpnsxd>)

Quote:

\------

"And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause
containing three adjectives: "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a
weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

That's actually not just three strikes, it's four, because in addition to
contravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has
a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the
adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together."

...

"Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "The
subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be
separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning."
That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject
separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily
have been transferred to the beginning. Another quadruple violation.

\------------------

Exactly! That's the beauty of Strunk & White -- and here I link to John
Gruber: [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/03/24/language-log-
str...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/03/24/language-log-strunk-and-
white)

The critic just doesn't get it.

Quote:

\------

Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using
downloaded classic texts from sources like <http://gutenberg.org>) show that
Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and
prejudice rather than established literary usage.

Consider the explicit instruction: "With none, use the singular verb when the
word means 'no one' or 'not one.'" Is this a rule to be trusted? Let's
investigate.

* Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for "none of us." There is one example of it as a subject: "None of us are perfect" (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It has plural agreement.

* Download and search Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of "none of us" with singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural ("I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of sunset").

* Examine the text of Lucy Maud Montgomery's popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There are no singular examples, but one with the plural ("None of us ever do").

\------

My Russian language teacher said (Russian is my native language): don't try to
write like the one who is a master in language that ignores the rules -- rules
are not for them. They are for you until you master the language.

Quote:

\------

Geoffrey K. Pullum is head of linguistics and English language at the
University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

\-----

Ah, OK. That's the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. (No, seriously,
British English is different from... sorry, different than American English.)

~~~
gruseom
_don't try to write like the one who is a master in language that ignores the
rules_

Who says S&W is "the rules"? When Mark Twain begins a sentence with "However"
or Oscar Wilde says "none of us are", those are hardly avant-garde artistic
leaps.

 _British English is different from... sorry, different than American
English._

Which points of Pullum's critique, exactly, do you claim fail to apply to
American English?

p.s. Your comment is so verbose that it ruins the readability of this entire
thread.

~~~
dchest
_Who says S &W is "the rules"?_

This is a difficult question. As far as I know, there is no organization that
defines rules for English language. Unlike, for example, Russian language that
has rules defined by the State Academy of Sciences. "Rules" and words for
English language are stated de facto -- e.g. Oxford dictionary has "blog",
while in Russia we still argue about "coffee" (is it "he", like official rules
say, or "it", like people say?).

Since there are no official rules for English, here I suppose that S&W is a
commonsense summary of what good English is.

 _Which points of Pullum's critique, exactly, do you claim fail to apply to
American English?_

Um... That was a joke.

Sorry about readability, I had to do that "what he wrote/what it really is"
thing to get readers some context.

~~~
gruseom
_here I suppose that S &W is a commonsense summary of what good English is_

Exactly, which makes your defense of it entirely circular.

~~~
dchest
Yes and no. I didn't argue about the language in my comment (since I'm not a
native speaker). My first point is about words taken out of context. My second
point is about joke in S&W. My third point is about this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557978>

------
lowdown
His grammar book is $161.42 - ouch! I bought the 50th S&W Elements. It is a
nice little volume and has some good advice in it. There are certainly better
style guides out there - no doubt. It's a guide, not a 6lb 1860 page grammar
bible.

------
jpwagner
Summary: Strunk and White are grammatical incompetents.

Nonsense.

~~~
gruseom
Pullum's article is so thoroughly substantiated that your comment suggests you
didn't read it.

It explains things that have bugged me for years. Where did I get these vague
ideas about split infinitives, beginning sentences with "However", and "which"
vs. "that"? Answer: through hand-me-down versions of Strunk and White, who
turn out to have been just plain wrong.

My sense of my own native language just got clearer.

Edit: it's possible that the harm was done more by over-rigid promulgation of
S&W's rules than by S&W itself, but I still think that Pullum's phrase
"unhappy state of grammatical angst" hits the nail on the head.

~~~
tokenadult
_Where did I get these vague ideas about split infinitives, beginning
sentences with "However", and "which" vs. "that"? Answer: through hand-me-down
versions of Strunk and White, who turn out to have been just plain wrong._

Actually, many of those bugaboos of English teachers in schools long precede
the publication of Strunk's book as edited by White. Strunk would have learned
his hang-ups from teachers who mindlessly passed on hang-ups they learned from
still earlier teachers.

