Earlier this month, when I was off work recuperating from surgery and still in an anesthesia-induced haze (I’m fine, thanks for asking), I found myself reading the September 2009 issue of College English. As you do.
I had stumbled onto the article, “The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk and White,” by Catherine Prendergast, an English professor at the University of Illinois, via some idle internet wanderings. I learned so many random things. And was left with so many lingering questions.
Random things first: Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a devotee of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and apparently a grammar fanatic. He corrected the grammar of everyone who wrote to him. He marked up the FBI report on him, circling words like analyzation and suggesting analysis instead. (Seems reasonable.)
Prendergast herself had to write to Kaczynski to request permission to quote from his writings, held in the Labadie Collection of Social Protest Literature at the University of Michigan. He gave permission—and corrected two typos in her transcription.
Prendergast clearly hates Strunk and White, and sees a clear (and I would argue, unfair) parallel between the old-school grammar prescriptivists and the lone-wolf terrorist: “Nobody believed in the power of clear, correct prose to right wrongs more than Kaczynski. He wrote clearly and correctly, and then he killed people.”
Just … wow.
Though I have to think Strunk and White would have approved of the simplicity and power of that second sentence.
Lingering questions: Since when do writing teachers hate Strunk and White? As I recall it was an assigned text in several writing classes I took in high school and college. But Prendergast is not alone in her opinion, the internet reveals. Which is presumably why she didn’t bother to explain what’s so bad about Strunk and White in an article for other college writing teachers. She’s preaching to the choir.
“If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!” is the advice I remember most from Strunk and White—besides the emphasis on simplicity and clarity. But apparently many of the grammatical rules stated so authoritatively in The Elements of Style are actually … wrong? What?
Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum of the University of Edinburgh makes that case in a furious article in English Today (another publication I will probably never have reason to consult again). There’s something about Strunk and White that clearly really, really gets to people.
Many of the grammatical rules in Strunk and White are “flatly contradicted by educated usage,” Pullum asserts. Pronoun case, for example: “No one could justify teaching American undergraduates a hundred years later … “ (Strunk first privately published The Elements of Style in 1918) “… to write something like The culprit was he.” Fair point.
Singular they, banned by Strunk and White, is found in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and—touché—White’s own Charlotte’s Web.
Hopefully, as in “Hopefully I’ll leave on the noon plane” (a construction I still feel vaguely guilty about using, presumably because of early exposure to Strunk and White) has been accepted usage since the 1960s, Pullum claims.
Then there’s the idea that adjectives and adverbs make writing weak. (I feel no guilt about using adjectives, but adverbs, definitely—although I love them truly, madly, deeply.) Yet The Elements of Style is filled with them.
“How on earth can a book be taken seriously in its injunctions when it tells the reader to write without adjectives and adverbs,” Pullum rages, “but says so in prose that is replete with them?”
Hm.
Carrie Golus 