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

As often happens, I picked up some good tips from the thread, including one
recommended book that I will follow up (on style / grace ... I think
suggested by one of the ladies), and much food for thought.

Peter G Martin's final quip was a bonus.

By happy coinky-dink, there's an article in The Age today, essentially
covering the same ground:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/revenge-of-the-word-nerds-20090417-a9r5.html?page=-1

Geoffrey - you'll be pleased to see that the journo makes numerous points
that you have already made and reaches much the same, if less scholarly,
conclusions.   Alas, he misses the opportunity to bring petitio principii to
his audience.

FYI
Carolyn





On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Geoffrey Marnell
<geoffrey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>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
>
>



-- 
Carolyn Hart

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