NEAL CONAN, host:
Today marks 50 years since the publication of one of the most loved and influential books on writing, William Strunk and E.B. White's, "The Elements of Style." The endearingly nicknamed little book deserves none of its honors and devotion, according to linguist Geoffrey Pullum, who describes its authors as grammatical incompetence and idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.
Okay, English teachers, have at it. Our phone number, 800-989-8255, email us, talk@npr.org. And you could join the conversation on our Web site, go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Geoffrey Pullum is the head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh. And his piece, "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice," appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He joins us today from the Edinburgh studios of the BBC radio. Geoff, nice to have you back on the program.
Professor GEOFFREY PULLUM (Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh): Nice to be here, Neal.
CONAN: And do you hate puppies and apple pie, too?
Prof. PULLUM: I could do without puppies. Apple pie is very nice. Let me be fair to Strunk and White. I do say some moderately nice things about their style advice that is well-intended, does no harm. My claim is that on grammar, they're just about wrong all the time. And they do say quite a lot about grammar. They laid down a lot of rigid grammar rules in between the bits that are about purely style matters, like being clear and so on. The style stuff is mostly the same as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" described Earth -mostly harmless.
CONAN: Yet…
Prof. PULLUM: It really doesn't do much damage to students to be told things like, do not explain too much. Of course you shouldn't explain too much. It's fine. But as soon as they go on to grammatical points, they tell you things that just aren't true and never were true, not when they were writing and never in the history of the language. It's really amazing.
CONAN: One of the things that they talk about quite a bit or that they're cited talking about quite a bit is never to split an infinitive.
Prof. PULLUM: They don't actually make a rigid rule against that. And that's just as well, because every grammarian agrees the split infinitive is fully grammatical and always has been for 6 or 700 years. They do offer a sort of prejudice against it. They say, don't do this unless you really want to place an emphasis on the adverb or something. And that's exactly the wrong advice.
When you the tuck the adverb in and say, to really get this right, that underemphasizes the adverb. If you want the adverb to be stressed, put it at the end, after the rest of the verb phrase. So, where they say things that are checkable grammatical facts like that, they've got it exactly wrong.
And the prejudice against the split infinitive is just a piece of silliness. It's not even clear where it came from, but in something like 17th century, 18th century. And it's never been good advice. The split infinitive has been used by all the good writers down though the ages. It is minor writers who've been frightened by fierce copy editors that try to avoid it. And they don't really know why.
CONAN: There is another usage that they sternly argue against and that is if you use the word, none, its meaning is, no one, and it takes the singular.
Prof. PULLUM: Yes. I think it might originate, if we go back 4 or 500 years, in a combination of nay and one. But I checked in three or four books that were published around the time William Strunk was a young man - it's about 100 years ago now, that's how old this advice is - but at the time he was growing up, the novels he was reading would say, none of us are. They did not say, none of us is.
And you can check that so easily these days. You download the text of a classic novel from the 1890s from Gutenberg.org, and you search it with your word processor and see what happens with, none of us. The advice is just wrong advice. That's not how we write. People do not say none of us is ready. They say none of us are ready.
CONAN: And you're not talking about minor league writers here who you're checking. You're talking about people like Mark Twain.
Prof. PULLUM: Absolutely. And Oscar Wilde. I mean, that's a clincher for me. Dr. Chasuble in "The Importance of Being Earnest" is a learned reverend who ultimately couples up with Miss Prism, the governess. If Dr. Chasuble says none of us are perfect, that's grammatical. Oscar Wilde knew what he was doing. So it was grammatical then, it was grammatical before, it's grammatical now. Any advice to avoid this is just silly bossiness to no effect whatsoever.
This isn't about good writing. This is about giving untrue claims to students that will make them sort of uneasy about some of the phrases they use. And that's really what I worry about the most. Time is being wasted teaching students claims about grammar that aren't true and never were. And it just makes them vaguely uneasy. Every time they use the word me, or which, or that, they sort of remember there's something awkward and worrying, and they can't remember exactly what. The device is just harmful.
CONAN: Those of us who work in the journalism business have, of course, been terrorized in our time by ferocious copy editors that you refer to in your piece, and you referred to in this conversation, too. Given what you've been saying, how do you explain the devotion that White and Strunk have attracted over the years?
Prof. PULLUM: I think, actually, it's the personality of E.B. White, who's a beautiful writer. Keep in mind that I'm not saying this man was a fool and couldn't do anything. I'm saying his grammar advice just doesn't even match his own usage. He wrote beautifully. He did not write in a way that complies with his grammar rules.
He wrote humorously and as a kind of warm personality, and people came to love that in The New Yorker, and they love "Charlotte's Web" and "Stuart Little." They remember him. And the book has got something of his personality.
Now, it still sounds pretty old-fashioned, but it does sound like it's a friendly old uncle who's, you know, getting on for 90. In the passages where he's really talking about how to write, it does feel friendly. And my objection is just that most college students in America are not taking any serious course on grammar or language of any kind.
So the few grammar proscriptions, the bits and pieces about, don't say this, don't say that in the elements of style are just about the only grammar they ever see in their whole education. And that bit of a book is doing damage. It's a sort of radical edit to remove the false grammar claims that I'm proposing -not that we cease to respect E.B. White as a writer. He was great.
CONAN: Let's get a caller in on the conversation. If you'd like to join us, 800-989-8255. Email, talk@npr.org. Maybe an English teacher or two will call. Pam is with us on the line from San Diego.
PAM (Caller): Well, good morning. I do agree about - on the false rule of not splitting infinitives. But I think "The Elements of Style" is very helpful in the style guidelines. And I don't think they are useless, especially reminding people we need to be precise in our language and leave out extraneous words, like, instead of saying, in a hasty manner, saying, hastily. They are encouraging people to be more contemporary and shorter, like not…
Prof. PULLUM: Yeah. Many times, I think, in…
PAM: …time or a period. I think that's really important. I have been one of the dreaded copy editors.
(Soundbite of laughter)
PAM: …true. The material that comes from academics in no way reflects that they have ever opened up the "Elements of Style."
CONAN: You can come back to this point, Geoffrey.
Prof. PULLUM: Let me just say that I was saved from a factual error in my subject by an excellent copy editor for the journal, Language, just the other day. And I'm very grateful. Copy editors do great work. They read for content. They check that your numbers match where they should and so on. They do wonderful things. And they also change which to that every time it isn't preceded by a comma, in an attempt to obey a fictional rule that never held for decent literature ever and it's just not worth bothering with.
But you mentioned that we should omit needless words, Strunk's famous injunction, to omit needless words. And that, in a hasty manner, is verbose, where hastily would be better. Yes, they do say that. They also say don't use adjectives and adverbs at all, write with nouns and verbs. And that would rule out hastily, wouldn't it?
So some of the advice is just cuckoo. Others is good where it's good. And I would point this out. There are some words that are redundant because they're pretty well meaningless. And often it's good to leave them out. Just occasionally it's clearer if you leave them in.
CONAN: Pam…
Prof. PULLUM: We need our students to be skilled enough that they know the difference. And that's not going to be handed to them by just a straightforward maxim, like omit needless words. They don't know what's needless.
CONAN: It's usually handed to them by copy editors like Pam. And they have taught me well, too - doesn't make them any less ferocious. Pam, thank you very much for making the phone call.
PAM: Bye-bye.
CONAN: Here's an email from Ross. I was asked to use Strunk and White for teaching this semester and found that it confused the students more than it helped them. It gives poor examples, few explanations and no definitions in the chapter that relates to grammar. The chapters on style, all of which emphasize brevity and clarity, are not as bad. So there's an English teacher who agrees with you.
Prof. PULLUM: Well, that is one of a short list. I am getting quite a lot of flak over the email. It's one of the days when I regretted having an email address.
CONAN: I was going…
Prof. PULLUM: I get a lot of angry stuff from teachers.
CONAN: And I was going to ask you what their reaction to this piece has been, and has any of it been productive?
Prof. PULLUM: I've had a lot of extreme hostility on blog discussions, people just calling me a moron, saying that I write badly. And most baffling of all, ethnic slurs. They say, what's this Scot doing criticizing an American book? Now, I'm an American citizen of longstanding with 25 years in the University of California. I only moved to Edinburgh, which is brand new to me, where I work among many Americans, about a year and a half ago. It was quite astounding to be - to find that I was being dismissed as a Scot who didn't have a right to speak.
I speak as an American. It's an American book that's doing damage to American students by making them anxious about grammar without making them well-informed about it. And a lot of people are missing the actual things that I've said in the article and the distinctions that I've drawn, that I agree with them about style, and I hate bad writing.
I want undergraduate writing to be improved. I'm separating out, though, the grammar dogmatism. And the person who's email you just read, well, I'd like to have that email address so I could write and thank her.
CONAN: We're talking with Geoffrey Pullum about his article, "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" on "The Elements of Style" that appeared this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He's with us from Edinburgh in Scotland.
You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
And let's go to Ben. And Ben's on the line with us from Cincinnati.
BEN (Caller): Hi, how are you doing?
CONAN: Very well, thank you.
BEN: Good. Good. A friend of mine posted the piece on Facebook and most of colleagues in graduate school heartily affirmed your conclusions. I did have a question, though, Steven Pinker attributes the oath of office snafu to Chief Justice Roberts' rewriting of the oath so as to eliminate the split infinitive. I was curious what your opinion on that was.
CONAN: Of course, he's…
Prof. PULLUM: Actually…
CONAN: He's referring, let me just clarify, of course, Chief Justice Roberts administering the oath of office to President Obama. He wasn't president until he swore him in. And that, of course, was just this past January. And, well, he got the words wrong.
BEN: Right.
Prof. PULLUM: Yes. But the story is actually even more surprising. Along with the people, who quite wrongly believe the split infinitive has got something wrong with it, there are even more extreme and strange people, like the ones who wrote the Texas style guide for lawyers, which says that you should never put an adverb between a pair of auxiliary verbs.
And the wording of the oath that Obama had to take violates that. And it looks like Justice Roberts slipped up by involuntarily applying the rule from the Texas style manual and moving the adverb to the end. And then he realized that these are magic words, and you have to say them in the right order.
Obama caught it. He's very sharp. He spotted there was a mistake. He hesitated before repeating it and smiled. Then, at the same moment, Obama decided to go ahead and repeat it wrongly, while at the same time, Justice Roberts decided to go back over himself and repeat it correctly. And for awhile the two were speaking together. And later they decided it was such chaos that we do it again in private and get it right.
I thought it was very funny. But it wasn't strictly connected to split infinitives. It was connected to an even stranger proscription that says never say, what is it, I do solemnly swear…
CONAN: Swear, yes.
Prof. PULLUM: …which has adverb between two verbs. You must put the adverb at the end.
CONAN: Oh.
Prof. PULLUM: That's never been a grammatical rule, either.
CONAN: Well, it's also if there's one oath it's actually spelled out in the Constitution, you better speak it word for word. That's the other rule that they should've applied. It's not in Strunk and White, either. Ben, thanks…
Prof. PULLUM: I guess they should've been reading them.
CONAN: Yeah. Ben, thanks very much for the call. Yeah. Don't memorize - don't pretend to read something you haven't actually memorized. You're there in Britain, I wanted to ask you, this is the primary instruction on style and grammar that most American students read. What do they use there?
Prof. PULLUM: All sorts of books, but they've never heard of this one. It's quite surprising that it's got no market penetration in Britain, as far as I can tell. It's on sale through Amazon, but you don't find that people have even heard of it. So this is a distinctively American book.
And if I were really a Scot who lived my whole life here, I wouldn't even know about it. But it's my 25 years working in the American linguistics context that brought me in contact with it.
CONAN: Let's get a quick question in from Camille(ph) in Pierpoint, Michigan.
CAMILLE (Caller): Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'm not in a classroom, but I do help students with their writing problems. I do some editing and tutoring. What publication would you recommend, if any?
Prof. PULLUM: Can I ask the age of the students?
CAMILLE: High school, mainly.
Prof. PULLUM: Very difficult. I don't think there's an ample supply of decent books, but I think there are some. For college students I generally recommend "Joseph Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace," but it's a bit advanced for high school students.
I think I should do some work looking around among the high school level books that are available, but I'm a little bit afraid to do so because I have found such appalling material on language in some of the places that I've looked. There are books out there that are much worse informed than Strunk and White are.
CONAN: Than even Strunk and White. Wow. Camille…
Prof. PULLUM: I think there are some gaps. I think there are some gaps in - the market needs more works of just this kind, actually, and modern ones. Because it is important, I think, that "The Elements of Style" originates in the First World War period. It's not going to sound up-to-date for today's kids.
CONAN: Camille, thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it.
CAMILLE: Thank you.
CONAN: And Geoffrey Pullum, thanks for your time.
Prof. PULLUM: I'm very glad to be here, Neal. Nice to talking to you.
CONAN: Geoffrey Pullum at the University of Edinburgh. His article, "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice," appears in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. You could find a link to it at our Web site.
Copyright © 2009 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.