The pompous style in Nancy

[Nancy , April 18, 1966. Via Random Acts of Nancy .]

He must be an Honors student.

“The pompous style” is a key term in Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013):

So accustomed are we to the pompous style as the voice of authority that students can’t be blamed for thinking it the way they should write in school. Indeed, our educational institutions — ahem, schools — do much to encourage this belief. Children learn to read and write short, plain sentences — “See Spot run” — then grow older and begin to write as if “Observe Spot in the process of running” were somehow an improvement. By the time they arrive at college, almost all revere formality in and of itself as the mark of good writing. And by and large they learn to write like George Eliot’s self-important man of business, Borthrop Trumbull, talked: “Things never began with Mr. Trumbull: they always commenced.”

A related post
A wrongheaded “dead words” movement

[The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing was my favorite book for teaching college writing: small, inexpensive, beautifully written, sane. I recommend it to all students and teachers.]