Rhet/Comp: July 2009 Archives

This year celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the audacious "little book," The Elements of Style. 

Noted linguist and grammarian Geoffrey Pullum wrote a pretty scathing review of the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education, needling away at Strunk's more ambiguous, if not downright inaccurate, directives which have caused "grammatical angst" for college students and graduates for decades. Subsequently, Pullum contends that

English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.

Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, highlighted her own beef with Strunk & White, noting that the little book is "the only grammar book so many people have ever studied."  And because of this, those prickly stylistic suggestions have taken on the vaunted status of hard-and-fast rules.  How true! 

I was introduced to Strunk & White in my high school composition classes.  Days were set aside where the class broke into small groups and completed handouts devoted to sections of the book.  I remember having to revise sentences according to the "rules of usage" and "principles of composition," as well as explain why "effect" was preferred over "affect."  I wasn't seriously introduced to another grammar book until graduate school when I had to use Lunsford & Connors' The Everyday Writer in the freshmen composition courses I taught.  Yet, by that time, Strunk & White's recommendations were what I knew and thought to be true.

I'm left wondering how much exposure today's college students have in terms of grammar books.  A quick glance in my library's reference collection reveals citation style manuals galore (MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian, AMA, etc.) but few grammars.  Two that did catch my eye: Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (4th ed.) and Shertzer's The Elements of Grammar.