atw: Re: Two comments on the Strunk and White thread

Geoffrey:

Ah, as they say in the classics, and "Apocalypse Now", I love the smell of 
petitio principii in the morning.

Or it was something like that..



You wrote:
> Hi austechies,
>
> It was good to see another lively debate on this list. Keep it up.
>
> I found two sub-threads particularly interesting. First, some expressed 
> suspicion of
> the reviewer of Elements of Style (EoS) because he had written a similar 
> book. Surely,
> a better response would be to be suspicious of the reviewer had he not 
> written a
> similar book. It is through publishing?where we submit our ideas to the 
> scrutiny of
> peers?that we achieve a respectable intellectual status (and advance 
> knowledge). In
> other words, it is by publishing in a field that we earn the right to comment 
> on what
> others have published in the field. For it shows that we have done some 
> research, that
> we know about the field and thus can comment on it in some depth. Imagine the 
> state of
> human intellectual development if we always ignored a new book on the grounds 
> that
> somebody else has already published in the field. (With such an attitude 
> there probably
> wouldn't have been books.) You can query the motives of the author, but that 
> is not
> making one iota of a contribution to the field. It just smells of the fallacy 
> of
> argumentum ad hominem: criticising an argument solely on the grounds that 
> there is, or
> you think there is, something distasteful about the person making the 
> argument (such as
> ulterior commercial motives).
>
> The second point that struck me was how the argument quickly shifted: the 
> review was
> primarily about the poor grammatical advice in EoS, and yet many contributors 
> to the
> thread leapt to the book's defence on the grounds that it offers some 
> excellent tips on
> good writing. That shift is an instance of the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi. 
> EoS might
> well offer some excellent tips on good writing, but what about the primary 
> arguments
> that the reviewer put forward, the arguments about grammar? Anyway, is having 
> some
> excellent tips on good writing sufficient in a language handbook? There is 
> some good
> advice in The Bible in places, but such advice in itself doesn't 
> automatically grant it
> any special status (intellectual or reverential). Would you still hold on to 
> your
> cherished EoS if you found another language handbook that also offered 
> excellent tips
> on good writing but didn't also offer flawed grammatical advice?
>
> But can you truly separate tips on good writing from grammar? Once you get 
> past the
> simple, common-or-garden, primary-school advice of writing simply, and 
> avoiding
> ambiguity and vagueness, you cannot escape grammar. (Do you write well if, 
> through
> ignorance, you fall foul of the subject?verb agreement rules? Or the rules on
> hyphenating compound adjectives? And so on and so on.) So for EoS to be 
> considered a
> book of substance on good writing means that its grammatical advice must also 
> be sound.
> So to argue that whatever the reviewer of EoS might think of the book's 
> grammatical
> advice, it is still a good guide to good writing is, in effect, to dismiss, 
> without
> argument, the reviewer's arguments. You are, in effect, accepting that the 
> grammatical
> advice in EoS is sound. And this smells of another logical fallacy: the 
> fallacy of
> petitio principii.
>
> But it has been fun.
>
> Cheers
>
> Geoffrey Marnell
> Principal Consultant
> Abelard Consulting Pty Ltd
> T: +61 3 9596 3456
> F: +61 3 9596 3625
> W: www.abelard.com.au


-PeterM
peterm_5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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