It is no doubt impossible to teach writing from a book on how to write, so, I suspect, any writing texts will be flawed or incomplete. I grew up with Strunk & White and hwve no problem with it as long as it is used the way it was intended (as Craig mentions below); also, I love the Williams' book. There are other useful writing books by Zinser and many others, but nothing can take the place of a good writing teacher, a good sense of how to make language serve one's purposes, and some great models of good writing to study from. While I think of it, a solid editor must also be a writer's best friend.
Paul
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" (_Twelfth Night_ 3.4.127-128).
________________________________
From: Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 1:29:51 PM
Subject: Re: An expert speaks? was ATEG Digest - 14 Apr 2009 to 15 Apr 2009 (#2009-86)
Dick,
E. B. White is, first of all, one of the premier essayists of the last century. He published quite often in the New Yorker. Essays like "Once More to the Lake" are frequently anthologized. So you could say that his book is part of a genre of advice books by practicing writers and shouldn't be thought of as some sort of "handbook" or all purpose manual. When I read it through the first time, I found a few very useful pieces of advice that I probably could have picked up elsewhere but hadn't. The USAGE sections are a carryover from White's teacher, William Strunk, and those too are best thought of as the idiosyncratic advice of a cranky composition teacher at the dawn of the previous century. Most of us could probably do better, or at least be more current. It is nowhere near a comprehensive grammar and never tried to be. It is probably used most frequently by writing teachers who don't like traditional handbooks but don't have a whole lot of
alternatives to choose from. I think the current alternative, one I would recommend over S & W, is Joseph Williams' Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (He actually has a few similar titles). Even Williams, though, is not as deeply informed or as comprehensive as he should be.
When I'm teaching writing (still my main job) I have the same problem everyone else does--how to pass on useful advice to people who know very little about language (most of it wrong). It's a daunting task. This divide between English studies and study of language is harmful to both sides.
Craig
richard betting wrote:
Bill, Scott and others,
What bothers me about The Elements of Style is that the authors spend about 90% of their time on issues of usage and very little on style. Do they mean that the two are synonymous? In terms of style, then, they seem to be saying that there is only one style, a formal, standard one and that it ought to be used in all situations. Strunk and White don't allow for informal or colloquial usage, to say nothing of the many functional varieties necessary to communicate with a variety of audiences today. That narrow view doesn't help students make effective stylistic choices when they write and speak, or for that matter, probably, to appreciate different styles being used by others. Just a guess: Many people who discuss ES [and I don't mean this about those discussing the issue here] probably haven't read it recently.
Dick Betting
On Apr 16, 2009, at 3:18 PM, Spruiell, William C wrote:
Scott:
I've had similar students --- but the advice they need is more along the
lines of, "use specific nouns, not fluffy ones." The problem really
isn't the adjectives and adverbs. And at least some of those students
aren't deliberately being verbose, or displaying signs of functional
illiteracy (they probably know a fair number of highly specific
nouns...but they're part of the students' passive vocabulary, rather
than being part of the active pool that is deployed when writing).
Instead, they've adopted a common strategy of marking out a general area
with the noun and then using modifiers to home in on a particular spot
in within it.
In fact, it's the same thing professional writers do when they come out
with sentences such as "The fact that these results have been observed
indicates that the phenomenon is real." "Fact" is fluffy -- but since I
know the genre, I know when I can get away with using it (if that
sentence bothers you, all I can say is that amazing numbers of articles
have been published with near-equivalents). Students pick up on that
kind of practice, but they don't yet have enough exposure to scientific
genre to know which words can be used in particular cases without coming
across as "gauche."
This simply highlights one of Pullum's points: One of S&W's major
injunctions is that writers should be clear and concise, but they wrote
THEIR OWN RULE in a way that attacked a side effect of the actual
problem rather than the problem itself, and implied there was something
wrong with entire classes of words that are only problematic when
they're used as part of a compensation mechanism. It's as if I watched
someone using glue to connect two pieces of wood that should instead
have been nailed together, and then proclaimed that glue is a bad thing.
I'd probably figure out my mistake once I saw people trying to nail
wallpaper.
Bill Spruiell
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