A review of a book by Arthur Plotnik. It's called Spunk & Bite: A Writer's Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style. A blurb from the publisher:

quote:

When too tightly leashed, writing chokes and loses its vitality. Although the rules of composition popularized in William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's Elements of Style have been de rigueur for decades, they won't exactly set your writing free.

Maybe he's just making amends for having written a book called The Elements of Editing.

quote:

First, I adore my Roget's International Thesaurus, even if it leads me unto temptation. I don't care what Simon Winchester says about "ill-versed" users lured into false synonyms. One has to be mad, moonstruck, unhinged, not to snorkel among these schools of words. Spunk & Bite offers tips, hints, pearls of wisdom, and fleas in the ear for doing so.

Along with such standbys as Fowler, Follett, Zinsser, Partridge, and Flesch, I keep Stephen Glazier's Word Menu in reach. No one has yet gathered and defined related terms with the passion of this lexicographer, who died heartbreakingly young. A recent discovery for me is Garner's American Usage, the most modern and thorough of its kind. Sin & Syntax by Constance Hale is my kind of liberating guide. For mechanical style, I find The New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage more amiable than most. And to clear my head of practical messages, to hear the purity of lyric, I read the poetry of Billy Collins.

Interesting, Z. I will look for it. The title is great...though I doubt that William would like it.

In a school paper I once described Strunk as the Rock of Gibraltar, and White as Magellan. Without a solid land mass of rules, syntactic voyagers wouldn't know how to sail uncharted waters of linguistic creativity. William might not approve of Spunk and Bite but I think E.B. would. If you read White's introduction in Elements of Style you might get the same impression that I did. Strunk was not without humor, despite much of it being bile.

Without a solid land mass of rules, syntactic voyagers wouldn't know how to sail uncharted waters of linguistic creativity.

But style or usage rules have little to do with a language's grammar, i.e., the system of rules, almost all of them unwritten, that a speaker (and writer) of a language learn unconsciously pretty much before they go to grammar school. Actual grammar rules involve phonology, morphology, as well as syntax, and lexical choice.) What they learn in grammar school are some arbitrary conventions, many of which contravene rules they picked up by being exposed to the language (mainly spoken, but also written). These rules, like (1) not ending sentences with prepositions, (2) not splitting infinitives, (3) not using the passive, (4) the which/that non-restrictive/restrictive relative pronoun selection, (5) most punctuation rules, etc., add little to nothing to the communicative value of the language. If they did, it would be impossible to correct most style errors without engaging in a conversation with the offending sentence's author to clarify her or his intentions.

The problem is that, for many, the dialect they were exposed to learning the language and the prestige dialect (or standard) have opposing sets of grammatical (in the narrow sense) rules. Rather the prestige dialect ought to be taught as a foreign language, which would mean that the instructor needs to have a familiarity with the grammar of students' non-standard dialects and its differences with the prestige dialect. After the students have a good grasp of the prestige dialect's set of grammatical rules, then they can be introduced to the arbitrary, but necessary usage and convention rules. The fact that few know grammar is due in part to the chaotic lack of the distinction between these actual grammar rules and arbitrary usage and style rules.

There's another book I've just learned about called Doctor Whom: ET Shoots and Leaves by Adam Roberts.

quote:

Doctor Whom, the grammatically correct TimeLord (or should that be Time Lord? Or is it Timelord?) has come to save our universe from the terror's of sloppy syntax and bad grammar. With his intrepid assistant Lynne: hes here to correct greengrocers sign's, popular fiction and government memos (memoes?) before inaccurate and lazy communication rips apart the very fabric of the space time continuum. Is it any wonder that the rise of global warming has coincided with the decline in the teaching of Latin in our schools? I do'nt think so. Will the Doctor save us all? or will his evil nemisises (nemisiss? nemisi?) The Dalek's triumph and rule over a universe where no-one has any clear idea of the correct usage of semi-colons?

I was in a bookstore today, of course looking at word and language books, and I see they have a new Strunk and White edition. This one has colored pictures and examples. I almost bought one for z, but thought better of it.

Doctor Whom: ET Shoots and Leaves by Adam Roberts.

Since Doctor Who is my favourite tv show evah, I should get around to reading this. I've heard that it manages to transcend its subject matter and tell an entertaining story. The idea is that "History, the life of the cosmos---it has a grammar", and time is "a kind of sentence." So it is the job of Doctor Whom and the other Time Gentlemen to make sure the sentence of time makes sense by keeping events in the right order.

quote:

Without a solid land mass of rules, syntactic voyagers wouldn't know how to sail uncharted waters of linguistic creativity.

If I can add to zmježd's response... if this statement was true, then it raises the question of how writers managed to write anything before people started to think and talk about English grammar in the 1700s.

This article by Geoffrey Nunberg is a good overview of the subject.

quote:

Originally posted by goofy:

If I can add to zmježd's response... if this statement was true, then it raises the question of how writers managed to write anything before people started to think and talk about English grammar in the 1700s.

.

We learn, whether from some prescriptive source or from our peers, the manners and structure of language. Do we not sometimes intentionally break those conventions in order to heighten the intensity of our words? Is it not a form of "breaking the rules" that create metaphor and simile? Of course, the author of Beowulf didn't have a dictionary to consult, but that person must surely have known the conventions of the day, and could see past them as well as could Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Joyce, or the chap speaking Cockney rhyming slang.

Doesn't language really grow from the vulgar to the sublime, despite the protestations of the prescriptivists? It seems to uneducated me that it's the vulgar (meaning "common" here) user who who understands, but sees beyond the prescribed rules, whether written or not, who creates what will in time become the sublime - or at least the accepted.

Now, I'll don my flame-resistant underwear!

quote:

Rather the prestige dialect ought to be taught as a foreign language, which would mean that the instructor needs to have a familiarity with the grammar of students' non-standard dialects and its differences with the prestige dialect.

This is a fascinating suggestion, and one which seems to have missed the minds of most elementary school teachers. I am well aquainted with the dialect of the casual register which my customers use. They tell stories in a "bush-like" form rather than in linearly, they use vulgar vocabulary (often using gratuitous cussing), and they tend to speak in highly fragmented sentences. I wonder how many of their teachers ever pause to consider that, by teaching English in the formal register at school they are, in effect, teaching entire classrooms of ESL students.

I think I largely agree with you, Asa. All speakers are aware of the grammatical rules of their language, and sometimes break them for effect.

I was just pointing out that a body of explicit prescriptive rules isn't necessary in order to sail the waters of linguistic creativity. Shakespeare had no schooling in English grammar.

As for the usage and style rules (that/which, not ending sentences with prepositions, etc.), which were introduced in the 1700s, they have not been followed by good writers anyway. I've never understood the reasoning that one must understand these rules before one can break them. Surely if I want to write well, I should emulate the style and usage of writers I admire? And if the writers I admire don't follow these arbitrary usage and style rules, then they're not rules worth following.