false 4 5 false false Thu Sep 25 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Sep 08 17:24:20 -0700 2008 Thu Sep 25 18:12:34 -0700 2008 1
I like grammar books.

Now, I don't usually like the ranting of old, white men who clearly don't have better things to do with their time. Usually, I want to hurl their books about. Usually, I'm all about the clever undermining of the status quo. But I like clear writing, and with few exceptions until very recently (such as the brilliant Karen Elizabeth Gordon), this means hanging out with some of the grumpiest, most conservative, and self-righteous old men. I'm talking about the white guys who you would think are out oppressing the natives when they're not drafting letters to The Times of London admonishing the editor's choice of comma instead of a semi-colon. William Strunk Jr. probably wasn't into oppressing natives, but he was a grumpy old college professor, and he did go down to the college's publications office to complain about the use of "alumni" instead of "studentry" (like citizenry). This is the guy you want to teach you grammar!

He is not the guy you want to teach you style. You'll end up doing a bad impersonation of Times-letter-writer guys. So the clever publisher asked E. B. White to write that part. It is a wonderful essay about trust and caution. Be cautious about discarding Professor Strunk's little rules because, whether a genius or no, you must provide your reader with clear prose. You owe it to your readers to make the language simple and correct so that they can focus on the ideas, your style, your language. They trust you to provide them with clear concept. You must become comfortable enough with the rules to trust yourself that you will only deviate from them when you expand the language by doing so.

I love being taught rules, and reminded that I'm allowed to shake them off, in the same book. I might disregard them more often than my writing can support, but that is why I like grammar books. I like the reminders. I like thinking about how to write and why. It can only improve how I write.

White says at the end:

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practicioner once remarked, 'Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.' This moral observation would have no place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what you are, rather than what you know, will at last determine your style.

]]>