Making my way through Steve Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, one thing I really appreciate is his lucid deconstruction and refutation of the tyranny of The Elements of Style, also known as “Strunk & White”. It’s not that I haven’t run into this line of thinking before from linguists. But it’s interesting to note that Pinker points out that Strunk & White violate the very maxims they promote in a sentence asserting the importance of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., using passive voice to exhort active voice). From what I can gather part of the issue is that the authors themselves were not linguistic scholars, so lacked the expertise to pass judgments on issues which they were only vaguely aware of. Nevertheless, they’ve attained a certain oracular status among many Americans. I know this because over the years of my blogging many readers have exhorted me to read Strunk & White to remedy my deficiencies as a prose stylist. At some point in the mid-2000s I tried, but found it all rather tedious. This makes sense, as I always detested the grammar section of English class. My teachers were sometimes perplexed, because I obviously read and wrote with a high aptitude.
Here’s a recent comment that I trashed:
Dear Mr Khan:
I offer to you this friendly advice: Proofread your work much more slowly and carefully than you do now. You are doubtless an intelligent man, but your English (clearly not your mother tongue, as one would expect of a South Asian) needs a lot more polishing than you seem to think.
Cases in point:
“Lines on a map does [sic] not an equivalency make.”
“…in the states of Punjab, West Bengali [sic]…”
“…the fertility in the BIMARU states is in the range as [sic] Pakistan…”
“…Guanyin is pervasive across Chinese the breadth of civilization [sic]…”
“This does not mean that modeling them in [sic] intractable…”
“…it manifests in more conventional class, sect, and ethnic lines [sic]…”
“…and it is disappears [sic] without the foundational support.”
“…even though though [sic] it is embedded in their customs.”Not to be too cruel, but your writing suffers a bit from the all-too-Indian vice of excessive wordiness: Why use fifteen words where twenty will serve as well? Betake thyself unto a used book store in the Amazon; there seek and find Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (it’s time someone clued you in).
Warmest regards,
Mr Chips
The comment is a little on the patronizing side, but it’s pretty typical. Perhaps ~10 years ago I’d have taken this sort of advice in stride, but at this point I think I’m doing OK. These comments are invariably from anonymous people leaving remarks on the internet.
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