Contra Strunk and White

The April 17th issue of The Chronicle Review had a great article by Geoffrey Pullman of the University of Edinburgh titled "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice". Well worth reading, as he takes the famous "Strunk and White" team to task for many mistakes and other problems with their high-school and college grammar standard "The Elements of Style".

I'm not a grammar expert. But I've always felt that certain "rules" from Strunk and White -- or their guidelines that others interpreted as rules -- seemed overly restrictive. Two examples: overly strict editing regarding passive voice and split infinitives. So it was nice to read this article and learn I'm not alone! After giving many great examples to prove his points, he ends with:

It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which," but can't tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.

So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own
misbegotten rules.