atw: Re: "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"

Once again I've been unable to join this discussion till now because of
other priorities - you know, that stuff we call work.

I won't be "binning" my copy and I'm certainly not changing my evaluation on
the basis of that review.

I agree that the review's author, Geoffrey Pullum, "knows a thing or two
about language" - I have one of his books on my shelves as well as (but not
next to) The Elements of Style. However I think we need to distinguish
clearly (note that I avoided splitting the infinitive here, to avoid another
fruitless excursion down that path!) between a book that teaches you grammar
and a book that can help you improve your writing.

Strunk and White's book is of the second type and has been acknowledged by
many, many writers and others for its contribution to developing their
writing skills. For Pullum to dismiss his advice on style as "mostly
harmless" is gratuitously offensive, I'd say - or maybe just indicates that
he has little appreciation of what good writing is about.

Looking through the book A Student's Introduction to English Grammar by
Pullum and Rodney Huddleston, I find it hard to imagine anyone would even
think of using it to improve their writing.  That would be like trying to
improve your singing ability by studying a music theory book. And if
familiarity with the theory in the book helped to improve one's written
exposition, you would expect the book to be a model of clear exposition and
not contain sentences like this:

"The basic meaning of the progressive is to present the the situation as
being in progress, but the general meaning tends to interact with features
relating to the kind of situation being described to yield a more specific
interpretation, a more specific difference between a progressive clause and
its non-progressive counterpart."

That isn't to say I think the book is rubbish, or even "mostly harmless" -
just to illustrate the difference between theory and practice!

Howard

2009/4/14 Geoffrey Marnell <geoffrey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

>  Hi austechies,
>
> A scathing review of Strunk and White's *The Elements of Style* can be
> found at:
>
> *http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=yJXgWVthcvvJ5wTZkmWwpptv8ymrsjbr*<http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=yJXgWVthcvvJ5wTZkmWwpptv8ymrsjbr>
> If that's one of your cherished style and grammar guides, it's probably
> time to bin it.
>
> The reviewer, by the way, knows a thing or two about language. He is
> Geoffrey Pullum, head of linguistics and English language at the University
> of Edinburgh and co-author of *The Cambridge Grammar of the English
> Language* (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
>
> Cheers
>
> Geoffrey Marnell
> Principal Consultant
> Abelard Consulting Pty Ltd
> T: +61 3 9596 3456
> F: +61 3 9596 3625
> W: www.abelard.com.au
>
>

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