I dream of Strunk and White

I dozed for a moment reading The Elements of Style yesterday afternoon and dreamed the following pair of sentences, in two columns, like the sample sentences in the book:

When I woke, I wrote down my dream sentences but soon grew unsure as to which was the original and which the revision. My daughter Rachel pointed out that they must go in the above order, since the second sentence is so much better than the first. Yes, she was kidding.

How important is a college education?

Various people answer the question. My contribution:

Tremendously important! (I'm an English professor, so you know I'm going to say that.) I will add though that there's a tremendous difference between getting an education and getting a degree.

The real point of college is the practice it offers in developing the ability to think and feel deeply and learn about the world and one's possible place in it. Not to learn how to make a living, but to learn how to make a life, as I remember an old professor saying at my freshman orientation, back in the 20th century.

Read all the responses at Productivity 501.

Toxic postscript

My post SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM. made it to Boing Boing yesterday, which means thousands of first-time — and last-time — readers. I posted Milton Glaser's advice partly because I'm interested (always) in what older people have to say, partly because I like the then 72-year-old Glaser's bluntness. (Older people often specialize in bluntness.) I also like the urgent, ominous, all-caps run-on — "SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM." — which looks to my eyes like the work of an outsider artist. That's the way the sentence appears on Glaser's website, sans internal punctuation, so it has someone's okay.

I didn't call Glaser's advice good (David Pescovitz called it "terrific"). But I do think it's good advice, which is to say, useful. And I've been surprised by the many angry responses this post has elicited. I don't think Glaser is suggesting that friends are for one's use, nor do I think he's suggesting that we walk away from situations that are difficult or exhausting (a friend in distress, a relative in the hospital). A more generous reading would take this advice as relevant to everyday encounters: with the colleague who makes every run-in in the hallway an occasion of hostility, with the supervisor who makes the workplace a theater of cruelty, with the acquaintance whose conversation is a stream of belittlement and mockery.

An anonymous commenter at Boing Boing offered the example of leaving a social situation and asking "Why the hell do I do this to myself?" That question seems to me to capture the scenarios in which Glaser's idea of toxicity applies. No one (except perhaps George Costanza) would ask that question after visiting a friend or relative in need. But in everyday social settings, it's exactly the question that suggests the need to walk away.

SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.

From "Ten Things I Have Learned," a 2001 talk by graphic designer Milton Glaser:

the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

This passage is from no. 3, "SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM" (via kottke.org).

If you're visiting from Boing Boing or elsewhere:

I posted Milton Glaser's advice partly because I'm interested (always) in what older people have to say, partly because I like the then 72-year-old Glaser's bluntness. (Older people often specialize in bluntness.) I also like the urgent, ominous, all-caps run-on — "SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM." — which looks to my eyes like the work of an outsider artist. That's the way the sentence appears on Glaser's website, sans internal punctuation, so it has someone's okay.

I didn't call Glaser's advice good (David Pescovitz called it "terrific"). But I do think it's good advice, which is to say, useful. And I've been surprised by the many angry responses this post has elicited. I don't think Glaser is suggesting that friends are for one's use, nor do I think he's suggesting that we walk away from situations that are difficult or exhausting (a friend in distress, a relative in the hospital). A more generous reading would take this advice as relevant to everyday encounters: with the colleague who makes every run-in in the hallway an occasion of hostility, with the supervisor who makes the workplace a theater of cruelty, with the acquaintance whose conversation is a stream of belittlement and mockery.

An anonymous commenter at Boing Boing offered the example of leaving a social situation and asking "Why the hell do I do this to myself?" That question seems to me to capture the scenarios in which Glaser's idea of toxicity applies. No one (except perhaps George Costanza) would ask that question after visiting a friend or relative in need. But in everyday social settings, it's exactly the question that suggests the need to walk away.

More on Pullum, Strunk, White

Below, a sampling of recent commentary on Geoffrey Pullum's "Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" and William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's The Elements of Style. Most of what follows is at least mildly pro-Elements. I haven't been able to find pro-Pullum pieces that do much more than restate his claims as true.

Chad Orzel is pragmatic:

While a slavish adherence to the rules presented in The Elements of Style would have unfortunate results for people who already write well, it would be a clear improvement for most college students. Just an attempt to follow the guidelines in Strunk and White would make most of the lab reports I have to grade dramatically better.

Strunk and White Is Not for You (Uncertain Principles)

Tim Carmody too is pragmatic:

I still think Chapter 5 of Elements, "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused," is pretty solid, and a good starting point for teaching young writers. Here the idea is that a few don'ts (as Ezra Pound would say) often can stop particularly dire barbarisms in their tracks.

Anti-Strunkites (Snarkmarket)

David G. Shrock is skeptical about the damage wrought by Strunk and White:

I agree with Pullum that The Elements of Style should not be the sole resource for learning grammar, but grammar instruction is not the intent of the book. Is it responsible for degrading grammar in America? Pullum does not offer any evidence.

Linguist and Reading Comprehension (Writing for Torre)

John Schwenkler too is skeptical:

"The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style,“ Pullum calls us. If only.

Strunk'd (The American Scene)

Charlie Loyd contrasts Strunk-and-White and Pullum by means of fine analogies:

Strunk and White are like expert gardeners. They wrote a very short introduction to gardening and sold it as a gardening book. Gardeners used it to learn about gardening, or, considering just how short it is, as inspiration to think consciously about gardening, and so it started or helped many careers in gardening.

Pullum is like an expert botanist. He reads the gardening book and says "This is absurd! They plant things next to each other that come from different continents. Why prune an apple tree when it grows fine on its own? Their suggestions for crop rotation are a ludicrous simplification of natural interspersal," and so on.

Pullum v. Strunk and White (Env)

And the New York Times is hosting a party, Happy Birthday, Strunk and White! Some party: it's Geoffrey Pullum and four other guests mostly hatin' on The Elements of Style. Pullum leads, repeating the hardly convincing claim that Strunk and White advocate writing without adjectives and adverbs:

Some of the commands would be all but impossible to follow: "Write with nouns and verbs," for example. No one avoids all use of adjectives and adverbs.

Gee, no kidding?

Stephen Dodson: "If people would stop touting it as the Indispensable Book and using it as a weapon, we wouldn’t have to annoy them with our attacks."

Mignon Fogarty ("Grammar Girl"): "Wishing there were hard-and-fast rules doesn’t make it so." (Reading The Elements of Style makes clear that many of its rules are far from firm.)

Patricia T. O’Conner: "much of the grammar and usage advice in the rest of the book is baloney."

Ben Yagoda: "a strange little book."

Mark Garvey, author of Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style (forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in October), has written a response to the Times piece. One good bit re: Pullum:

Professor Pullum writes: "The simplistic don't-do-this, don't-write-that instructions offered in the book would not guarantee good writing if they were obeyed." Guarantee it? Of course not — no more than a knowledge of musical scales can guarantee I will play piano like Horowitz. But scales are the way.

Strunk and White, The Elements of Style (Text Arts)

And finally, the comments on my post Pullum on Strunk and White should be of interest to anyone interested in this debate. This thread seems to get better as it goes on, with a number of readers offering long and thoughtful responses.

The final paragraph of my most recent comment on that post:

I think The Elements is a much more helpful book than Pullum allows. But is it, to paraphrase Tom Waits, a friend, a companion, the only product you will ever need? No.

Related posts
Strunk and White and wit
The Elements of Style, one more time

Y txt msgs r ltd 2 160 chars

b/c of sm guy Friedhelm Hillebrand he jus md it up. wtf! rd all abt it:

y txt msgs r ltd 2 160 chars (la tms)

"Pete's banjo head"

["Pete's banjo head." Photograph of Pete Seeger's banjo by Tom Davis (tcd123usa), via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons License. Thanks, Tom, for sharing your work.]

Happy birthday, Pete Seeger

I remember watching Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest on Channel 13 — table, benches, chairs, coffeepot, musicians. Folk music! I was eleven or ten.

I remember going to see Pete Seeger and the Hudson River Sloop Singers in Gaelic Park, the Bronx, August 4, 1969. I was twelve, and it was my first concert. My dad went with me (thanks, Dad). We parked under the elevated train tracks. It was quite an adventure to sing "Bring 'Em Home" and realize that everyone there was against the war in Vietnam.

I remember reading Pete Seeger's "Johnny Appleseed, Jr." column in Sing Out!: The Folk Song Magazine.

I remember Pete Seeger having a beard and always wearing a flowered shirt.

I remember "Living in the Country," "Old Devil Time," and "Sailing Up My Dirty Stream."

I remember "THIS MACHINE SURROUNDS HATE AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER," written on the head of Pete Seeger's banjo.

I remember the heart-shaped sound-hole of Pete Seeger's twelve-string guitar.

I remember seeing Pete Seeger perform on the porch of a house in Little Compton, Rhode Island. He was visiting an old friend and did a short performance for the local people and "summer people," all there by word of mouth. I happened to be in Little Compton with a friend whose parents had a summer house. I remember "Guantanamera" as the last song.

I remember Pete Seeger's songs and records in the house after our children came on the scene.

I remember listening to our Pete Seeger tapes on many family drives from Illinois to the East Coast. From a previous blog post: "Pete Seeger is the best driving music, at least for my family."

I remember our family singing variation after variation on "Sailing Up, Sailing Down" (to the tune of Jimmy Reed's "Baby, What You Want Me to Do"):

Some are young (some are young)
Some are old (some are old)
Young, old, old, young, up and down the river
Sailin' on, stoppin' all along the way
The river may be dirty now
But it's gettin' cleaner every day

I remember remembering to write this post to mark the day that Pete Seeger turns ninety.


[The New York Times, August 4, 1969.]

[My model for this post is Joe Brainard's I Remember.]

David Souter and Proust

"Have you read Proust?" he asked me during an unsuccessful clerkship interview years ago, and then wistfully said he wished he could take a year off to teach a college seminar on Proust and Henry Adams.

Law professor Jeffrey Rosen, in a New York Times op-ed piece on David Souter.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

It's Buy Indie Day

Today is Buy Indie Day, a day to buy books from independent bookstores. If you'd like to share news of the spoils of your shopping, leave a comment.

My spoils, from Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore: Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days.