atw: Two comments on the Strunk and White thread

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:  <http://www.abelard.com.au/> www.abelard.com.au

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