"Oh, Snap, You Just Got Strunked"

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Good to see I’m not the only one who thinks Strunk & White were full of shit: 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice

Being a linguist can be exhausting.

Also, as long as it’s their anniversary, I hereby remind you that I am trying to make “strunk” into a verb that means “to hypercorrect; to ‘correct’ something that does not need correcting.” I feel the irony if this works will be all too delicious. Happy anniversary, boys.

Comments

[blackbyrd2.livejournal.com]

Completely unrelated; Did I ever give you a link to Grow?

It's a series of Flash games. You'll either love it, or hate it. Obviously, I hope it's the former.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*becomes totally absorbed*

Damn you.

[kadharonon.livejournal.com]

Quickly! To metaquotes! (...which I don't actually follow, but which might lead down the road to successful application of "strunk" as a verb.)

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Join us...join us...

[d2leddy.livejournal.com]

That's a great article. Proof that style-over-substance rules.

[madcap-shiny.livejournal.com]

BWAAA. This is especially beautiful because my English teacher is a scary nun who swears by Strunk & White and has our class carry around copies and we all kind of hate it. A ton of people failed the quiz on it and she was very WE HAVE BEEN STUDYING THIS ALL TRIMESTER WHY DID YOU FAIL about it. We were...unmoved.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

You should print it out for her.

[madcap-shiny.livejournal.com]

Hee. If I do this (and I'm severely tempted) it will most certainly have to be anonymous, though. Otherwise...you know that effect shows use where some scary monster will leap out of the shadows and dismember a character, and it will cut to blood spattering on a wall? It would turn out a bit like that.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Gah. I won some literary competition at some point by totally filking Shel Silverstein (which resulted in my acquiring a very low opinion of the judges) and one of the "prizes" was a copy of S&W. It's entertaining reading, at least...

[erkunden.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Strunking, strank, strunk...?

[eric-mathgeek.livejournal.com]

(followed from dleddy)

Interesting, and I'm not a huge fan of S&W for similar reasons (including some of his), but I'm not totally buying all of his arguments. (I haven't read it all...)

Re passive voice, the examples he gave as mistakes do seem passive to me:

"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
Except "there" is essentially a pronoun who's antecedent is after the word itself, and that is a sign of passive voice. "A great number of dead leaves were lying on the ground" is shorter and clearer. or even better, "A great number of dead leaves lay on the ground."

"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
Again, "it" is a pronoun who's antecedent is after the word. "Before long, she was very sorry..." would be active.

"The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired"
He presumes the issue is "became impaired". Maybe the issue is "the reason that... was that..."? I will agree that this sentence isn't passive, and I don't really see anything wrong with it, but "He left college because his health became impaired" is easier to parse.

And I should add, sometimes one does want a passive sentence.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
Except "there" is essentially a pronoun who's antecedent is after the word itself, and that is a sign of passive voice. "A great number of dead leaves were lying on the ground" is shorter and clearer. or even better, "A great number of dead leaves lay on the ground."

No, that is a construction called an existential sentence. "There" actually has no antecendent; it's a dummy pronoun.

"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
Again, "it" is a pronoun who's antecedent is after the word. "Before long, she was very sorry..." would be active.

Nope, that's called a cleft sentence. "It" here is, again, a dummy pronoun.

And just for completeness's sake, "A pair of gloves with silk embroidery is what she bought." is also not a passive: it's a pseudo-cleft construction (more specifically, an inverted pesudo-cleft).

All of these constructions can be used with passive voice, but these particular examples are 100% active.

[eric-mathgeek.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I didn't know there was a separate term for this.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

No prob, it's not like anybody actually gets taught this stuff in school unless they take philology or a general linguistics course.

It's even possible to passivize that second one in a couple of ways (I'll highlight which clause is being passivized; brackets show optional elements):

"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had [said]."
-> "It was not long before she was very sorry that what she had said had been [said [by her]]."

The element that is promoted by passivization is shown with an underline.

"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had [said]."
-> "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what had been said [by her]."

Here, the direct object of the relative clause is promoted to subject, but the movement is obscured because the object in the active version is already displaced from its normal position after the verb to the front of the clause, due to wh-movement. The demotion of the subject of the clause to an optional oblique object, though, is clear.

And both together:

"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had [said]."
-> "It was not long before she was very sorry that what had been said [by her] had been said [by her]."

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well said, sir!

I've noticed before that there's some confusion between a linguistically passive construction and the semantic concept of passivity, too (someone in a writing class once described a sentence like "He liked tacos" as passive because you don't employ any action when you like something). Now I suspect Strunk & White are to blame.

I do think the article may misinterpret the "passive" idea in the last sentence, though--I had the feeling they were more angry about "the reason was that" than "became impaired." But given that S&W are all over the place with what "passive voice" could mean, I actually have no real clue what they're getting at. As far as I can tell, "passive" sentences are any sentences that could sound kind of awkward. But "avoid sentences that sound stupid" probably isn't the sort of sagely specific writing advice that lasts 50 years in the classroom.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Better advice would be to know what these different specialized constructions do (like focusing or de-emphasizing an element), and to prefer a simpler sentence when there's no specific reason to do that. That's a lot harder to boil down to a quick, simple maxim, though.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

That would most assuredly be the best way if only kids could learn it well. I also rather favor the idea of letting kids pick it up naturally as they read. But hey, as long as we're dreaming, I'd like a pony. ;)

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Grr, I should've read more closely, or I would've realized that I didn't need to come up with a new example, because "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" is also an inverted pseudo-cleft. It follows the X + be + relative clause pattern; it just happens to also have a complement headed by "that" in the subject ("the reason that he left college") as well as the predicate.

(The non-inverted equivalent is "That his health became impaired is the reason that he left college": relative clause + be + X. It sounds a bit formal, but it's well-formed. Colloquial speech prefers pseudo-clefts with subject relative clauses headed by the "-ever" relative pronouns, e.g. whoever, whichever, whatever, however, etc.)

[wrendragon.livejournal.com]

Heh, cougarfang linked me here because apparently our grammar-upset sounded similar in your post and mine. I'm taking a grammar course in second-year University and discovering things they never bothered to teach me in any previous English class.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad that the English Professor I had in college just had us use the MLA stylebook instead of S&W.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

The only thing I'd quibble with in that essay is the that/which distinction. I think that ship has sailed completely, and regardless of how artificially it was introduced, it now seems to be a living part of American dialects. It's interesting to note that the rule has "gone native", in a way that the older proscription against "split infinitives" never has. Probably because the no split infinitives rule directly contradicted native speaker intuition, marking common constructions as "incorrect" and not actually adding anything to the language, while the restrictiveness rule only reinterpreted existing constructions and created a useful distinction that aids communication.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Ye gods, now I know who's to blame for that damnable paperclip constantly popping up and suggesting I convert my sentence to the active voice. SHUT THE FUCK UP, PAPERCLIP! It sounds better the way I wrote it! (Not to mention that your suggestion is cumbersome and insane)

My biggest beef with stylebooks has been that they encourage uniformity of thought and expression. People fall into the habit of using the standardized form of the language, rather than their own idiosyncratic form, which is far more telling and expressive of their way of thinking. My works are always filled with red zags, and they're the better for it.