50 years of bad grammar advice | Hacker News Reader

50 years of bad grammar advice

chronicle.com

73 pointsquoderat40 comments

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.

And Pullum don't actually make any suggestions for better book. It's fine to criticize and dwell in to your loved subject as deeply as you want, but the rest of us need help.

If the Elements is not a good book, then what is, and if there is none, then maybe Mr. Pullum should write one.

Well, he wrote a book on this topic http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

Edit: and they're kind of shy:

"Our aim is to describe and not prescribe: we outline and illustrate the principles that govern the construction of words and sentences in the present-day language without recommending or condemning particular usage choices. Although this book may be (and we certainly hope it will be) of use in helping the user decide how to phrase things, it is not designed as a style guide or a usage manual."

And at $161 it's not going to sell as well as The Elements of Style.

He wrote a follow-up entry on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1319 It's mostly a response to the comments on Fark, so understandably he's a little bitter. Still, he does recommend an alternative: Joseph Williams' Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.

Here, "covered", an active, transitive verb taking the direct object "ground", conveys vividly what the verbose and pale construction "were lying", coupled with the repositional 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's point here is that neither phrase is passive construction, so you cannot point to the second one as better for that reason. The second sentence is better for the reasons you argued, but not because they eliminated the passive voice.

Yes, neither phrase is passive, in the technical grammatical sense, but the first is passive, as opposed to active: i.e. dull, inactive, indirect, circuitous.

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).

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.

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

An excellent rebuttal. Well done!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

George Orwell writes at least as well as E. B. White. His "Politics and the English Language" is better writing advice than Strunk and White, and was recently submitted to HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542250

Besides the copy of the essay linked there, there are other copies on the Web, for example,

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

showing the importance of this essay. I think undergraduates (or even high school students) would be better off reading Orwell's essay when they learn to write than reading Strunk and White.

"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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Quote from the article:

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"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:

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"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...

The critic just doesn't get it.

Quote:

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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").

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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:

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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).

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

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.

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.

here I suppose that S&W is a commonsense summary of what good English is

Exactly, which makes your defense of it entirely circular.

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

Here's a quote from Strunk himself (from the original introduction):

"It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature."

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.

Summary: Strunk and White are grammatical incompetents.

Nonsense.

Geoffrey Pullum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Pullum

knows what he is talking about.

"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.

"* 'It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had' also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.

"* 'The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired' is presumably fingered as passive because of 'impaired,' but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. 'Become' doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that 'A new edition became issued by the publishers' is not grammatical.)"

I agree with Pullum that one of the big problems of Strunk and White as a guide to writing is its nearly complete ignorance of discourse structure or any other level of analysis beyond looking at single sentences.

I don't want to comment on the grammatical correctness, being a non-native English speaker, but on the subject of the passive in general I can safely say I sure wouldn't mind some code to screen it out of our bug reporting system. Quite often the primary response is "The reason this is happening is because of X. X should be modified to trap this" or some such. Invariably, I have to enquire "so who will fix X and when are they likely to do it"? The passive construction has been used to mean "I will fix X now", "I would fix X but I am not going to", "I am addressing this to Joe, and I naturally assume that he will understand that he is supposed to fix X along the lines I described".

I'm seeing a connection between passive/active and declarative/imperative.

The issue here is that people are evading responsibility, not that they are using the passive voice to do it (though the passive voice is notoriously handy for this purpose).

No, there is no conscious evasion of responsibility. The person who writes the response thinks they are saying "I will fix it" or "I am telling X to fix it" and the passive voice is consistent with what they think they are saying. It is just hard for anyone else to figure that out without being mindreaders.

This is particularly common in people with academic background, as the passive voice is often encouraged in scientific writing.

Care to give reasons for your opinion?

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.

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.

Have you read Strunk and White?

The idea that the split infinitive is bad comes from a fixation in the 18th century that Latin (long dead even at that time) was a somehow superior language. You can't split infinitives in Latin (or most of its descendents). "To sleep" in Latin is dormire. That includes the concept of "to", so there's no way to say "to soundly sleep". You'd have to put it as "to sleep soundly," and so automatically, that's the "correct" form in English, too. English is an inferior language to Latin, right?

Same story with ending a sentence with a preposition, dangling participles, and other taboos: there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but you couldn't or didn't do it in Latin. Ergo, it's bad.

The real fault is the attempt to make functional language into hard science. It's not. Language was not invented by god. It's a human construct, and using it is nearly an art.

Good advice? Useful. Sure, don't over-explain. But don't bother getting into an argument with someone about whether a word in a sentence was truly necessary. People who do those kind of things have lost perspective.

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