Dear All,
One can hardly ever offer a suggestion on this list without someone disagreeing. Where it comes to Strunk & White, I understand Gunnar, Stanislav, David, and others on this issue. Even though I cannot totally disagree with their comments, I’d argue that they may be confusing the entire range of views on writing and writing tools with a specific tool that is well suited to some purposes. Let me offer a few thoughts on why I like Strunk & White.
This note involves serious thoughts and specific examples. Please forgive the length. If the topic doesn’t interest you, scroll on by. If the topic does interest you, you’ll find complete references and links to the books and articles I discuss.
Strunk & White is not perfect in every respect. Even so, the book is valuable for those who wish to write better. It helps people to think about writing in useful ways.
Three chapters in Strunk & White (1999: v-vii) focus on usage and grammar: Chapter 1, “Elementary Rules of Usage,” Chapter 3, “A Few Matters of Form,” and Chapter 4, “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused.” Two chapters focus on composition and style: Chapter 2, “Elementary Principles of Composition”, and Chapter 5, “An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders).”
When I use Strunk & White in writing workshops, I focus on the chapters 2 and 5. If you’d like to see how I integrate this material into a workshop, download the Research Writing Workshop slides from the “Research and Writing Skills” section at:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
These are the slides and not the workshop, so they don’t show how I frame and contextualise the advice from these two chapters, but it will give you an idea.
My comments on style and writing came up in a note on capital initials for common nouns. Terry Love commented that American and British styles differ, suggesting that I was using the Chicago Manual of Style. I noted that The Economist Style Guide and other British English manuals support my view on capital initials.
Because these style guides describe the detailed mechanics of writing for publishers or journals, I ended by declaring Strunk & White my mentors. I assumed people would recognise that the word “style” in the title Elements of Style differs to the word “style” in the title of a style guide. This kicked off a new thread. Half a dozen posts followed consigning Strunk & White to the bottom of the sea or the netherworld.
Let me explain why I like Strunk & White … and why I mentioned them on a list dedicated to doctoral education in design.
People responsible for research students must help their students to develop a wide range of skills. These skills include writing.
Research students focus on their subject fields, typically with little time to study writing. Professional students at universities and university-level design schools face similar challenges. Helping them is a double challenge for teachers who are not language teachers.
Nevertheless, we must take seriously the responsibility of teaching subject discipline students to write well. This helps them to successfully make the transition from entry programs to upper-level and graduate programs. Writing will be even more important for those who become research students and graduate researchers. Those who aspire to an international research career will use English.
English is the major international language for scientific and scholarly publication. Many professional schools in non-Anglophone nations teach in English. Most research programs use English as the language of research training and publishing.
We face a challenge in helping students and younger researchers to develop a solid English prose style for writing at university level and writing for research publications. The challenge is made more difficult by the fact that these students have not come to study English.
Over the years, I have faced this challenge in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark teaching research methods, social science, management, and design theory to undergraduates, graduates, and research students. I have had similar experiences delivering workshops in Finland, Hong Kong, China, and even in the United Kingdom.
When students study for a profession, we can’t ask them to read massive grammar books. We generally can’t ask them or take language courses to correct the deficiencies they bring with them from other schools.
We need tools and guides that they can use reasonably well in limited time. My experience is that Strunk & White is such a tool. Together with coaching from an experienced supervisor or research teacher, it is a valuable resource.
There are better tools, more precise, more detailed, and more correct. The Little, Brown Handbook (Fowler and Aaron 2013) is comprehensive and complete. It addresses every major issue in Strunk & White and hundreds more, always at a more detailed level with deeper explanations and rich examples. Fowler and Aaron deal with nearly every problem a writer might need to address. Professional writers and editors use it. So do students and professors.
Nevertheless, there is a catch. Little, Brown is massive reference book with over 900 pages of small type. No one “reads” Little, Brown as we read Strunk & White.
In my view, Strunk & White teaches general principles. Little, Brown answers specific questions. It takes two hours to read Strunk & White well enough to gain a broad, reasonable understanding of the issues. It takes a decade to read Little, Brown to the point that an ordinary person can claim a reasonable understanding of the contents.
When I was dean at Swinburne Design, we used to give every new research student and all new research staff a copy of both books, along with a current edition of the APA. It was my experience that people found Strunk & White the most useful among the three books.
There is another reason I value Strunk & White. Those of us who review the typical run of poorly written articles and papers submitted to conferences and journals need a simple, handy way to offer advice that can help authors to improve. Again, I find Strunk & White handy.
It takes me five or six hours to write a useful, detailed review. Many articles or papers have enough intellectual merit to warrant revision and resubmission even though they demonstrate flaws in mechanics and writing as well as on minor conceptual aspects. Reviewers do authors a service by showing them where and how to improve.
Even so, no reviewer should do more than the five or six hours of reading, annotating, and writing required for a thoughtful review. It helps to have a few tools to recommend. Once again, we need tools that people can use. The added virtue to Strunk & White is that people do not even need to buy a copy — they can read the still-useful first edition of Strunk (1918) at Bartleby.com.
Fluent writers like Don Norman, Stanislav Roudavski and Gunnar Swanson can afford to dislike Strunk & White. Skilled editors like David Durling can afford to dislike Strunk & White. Fledgling writers can’t. Neither can people who don’t have the experience that David has in teaching how-to-write courses for professional students and new researchers.
My bookshelf once contained over one hundred books on writing, teaching writing, and developing writing skills. Many of those titles are good. Some — like Plotnik (2007) — are better than good, to paraphrase the title of another of Plotnik’s excellent books [for more information, go to URL: http://www.artplotnik.com ]. Most are useful for technical reasons. Most of these one hundred books went untouched for years after I read them. I left all but a dozen in Australia when I returned to Sweden. The good titles are useful for people who want to go deeper. If they are willing and have time, that’s great.
Three final notes.
First, when we actually work with writers as developmental teachers and editors, books don’t help. That’s when we must sit side by side with a writer, going over a text one sentence at a time to show people how better writing emerges from specific choices. Each choice must be made in the context of an article, and each choice affects the balance and direction of the text that precedes or follows the specific passage, the specific word, or sometimes the punctuation mark.
Strunk & White, Plotnik, and other such books are useful for those students who want more. If they are willing to read on their own, these are valuable tools.
People who want hands-on experience from skilled advisors can get it through programs such as the Dart+ program at Coventry University [for more information, go to URL: http://dartplus.org ].
Second, Gunnar pointed to Geoffrey Pullum’s (2009) critique of Strunk & White. Pullum, a professor of linguistics and a brilliant writer, loves to position himself as a cheerful, slightly sardonic controversialist. His book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax: And Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language (Pullum 1991) is a charming tour de force on language and scholarly conventions. But I disagree with Pullum on Strunk & White. And Pullum himself made a couple of grammatical errors on the topic of subject-verb agreement because he was confused about the subject of the sentence.
Pullum’s example from Oscar Wilde was “None of us are perfect.” Strunk & White state that one should use the singular form of the verb when the word none means “no one” or “not one.” Pullum states that the example demonstrates plural agreement — it doesn’t. Wilde’s expanded sentence would be “Not one of us are perfect.” It should be “Not one of us is perfect,” or “No one among us is perfect.”
The subject of the sentence — “one” — is singular. The word “us” is the object of the phrase, not the subject. It should be evident from the use of the word “us.”
For plural agreement, the sentence would have had to read, “We are not perfect.” None of us is. Even a scholar of Pullum’s standing makes a mistake from time to time. In this case, Pullum was using the mistaken point to criticise Strunk & White on a matter in which they were right, not wrong.
Full disclosure: I admire Geoffrey Pullum nevertheless. [For more information, go to URL: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/ .]
Third, Stanislav linked us to comments by Will Self (2014) on George Orwell. Self discounts Orwell’s merits as a writer and he particularly dislikes Orwell’s (1946) six rules.
Will Self is a journalist noted for charming, sprightly articles on a wide variety of topics. As a controversialist selling his wares to editors in search of readers, Self must find topics that catch the eye immediately and draw readers in. Accusing Orwell of mediocrity as a writer certainly hits the mark. Even so, I find it disingenuous for a writer to acknowledge that he has read Orwell’s work many times over while nonetheless claiming that he is a mediocrity.
Only time will tell whether Will Self is capable of judging excellence and mediocrity in writing. Self is a respectable writer with a good track record. Even so, I wouldn’t trust this kind of judgment to a fellow whose best-known novel is The Book of Dave. As the author of another book titled The Butt, Self is hardly in line for the Nobel Prize. As it is, two or three dozen writers and scientists who have won the Nobel Prize quoted Orwell in their Prize speeches and essays. Whose opinion would you value more?
Let’s be clear: I don’t place Orwell on my list of great prose stylists. He is nevertheless a great author and not a mediocrity. Whatever one thinks of his prose style, he is a serious, workmanlike writer. You can read Orwell and understand him. That is the point of the six rules.
For me, Strunk & White remains valuable for helping people to think about writing in useful ways.
That’s why I like Strunk & White. Since 1964, I have read The Elements of Style once a year, the way some people read their favorite novel by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. I learn something new every time, in the sense that I deepen my understanding of the English language with each reading. I may be wrong, but I attribute some part of my skill as an editor and writer to the two hours of every year that I spend with William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia ||| Visiting Professor | UTS Business School | University of Technology Sydney University | Sydney, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
Telephone: International +46 480 51514 — In Sweden (0) 480 51514 — iPhone: International +46 727 003 218 — In Sweden (0) 727 003 218
—
References
American Psychological Association. 2009. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th Edition. Accessible at URL:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Publication-Manual-American-Psychological-Association/dp/1433805618
Accessed 2014 September 20.
Fowler, H. Ramsay, and Jane E. Aaron. 2013. The Little, Brown Handbook. Twelfth Edition (Pearson New International Edition). Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited. Accessible at URL:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Brown-Handbook-Ramsey-Fowler/dp/1292025344
Accessed 2014 September 20.
Orwell, George. 1946. “Politics and the English Language.” Accessible at URL:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Accessed 2014 September 18.
Plotnik, Arthur. 2007. Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style. New York: Random House Reference Publishing. Accessible at URL:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spunk-Bite-Contemporary-Paperback-08-May-2007/dp/B00D5H1UHC
Accessed 2014 September 20.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1991. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax: And Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Accessible at URL:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Eskimo-Vocabulary-Hoax-Irreverent/dp/0226685349
Accessed 2014 September 20.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2009. “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 17, 2009. Accessible at URL:
http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497
Accessed 2014 September 20.
Self, Will. 2014. “A Point of View: Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity.” BBC News Magazine. 30 August 2014. Accessible at URL:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28971276
Accessed 2014 September 20.
Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. 1999. The Elements of Style. 4th edition. Foreword by Roger Angell. Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon. Accessible at URL:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Elements-Style-William-Strunk-Jr/dp/020530902X/
Accessed 2014 September 18.
Strunk, William, Jr. 1918. The Elements of Style. 1st edition. Ithaca, New York: W. P. Humphrey. Accessible at URL:
http://www.bartleby.com/141/
Accessed 2014 September 18.
The Economist. 2014. The Economist Style Guide. Accessible at URL:
http://www.economist.com/styleguide/introduction
Accessed 2014 September 18.
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