The Elements of Bad Style?
Posted April 26th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthyCategories: Books
I think it was Peter Viereck (or was it Voegelin?) who said about Joseph McCarthy and his enemies, “I don’t like hysteria, and I don’t like hysteria about hysteria.” Well, I don’t like pedantry, and I don’t like pedantry about pedantry, either. Geoffrey Pullum’s Chronicle of Higher Education piece drubbing Strunk and White’s Elements of Style falls into the latter category. What’s worse, Pullum makes the kind of mistakes he attributes to Strunk and White. Regarding Elements’ injunctions against the passive voice, he writes:
What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. “At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:
*”There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
* “It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had” also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
* “The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired” is presumably fingered as passive because of “impaired,” but that’s a mistake. It’s an adjective here. “Become” doesn’t allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that “A new edition became issued by the publishers” is not grammatical.)
Pretty damning — or it would be if Strunk and White had actually claimed any of those were passive constructions. They don’t. Here’s how they introduce these examples: “Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.” (My link is to the online text of the Strunk-only 1918 edition, but the passage is unchanged in later editions.)
Now, Strunk and White themselves use the passive voice in that sentence, so one might say they are violating their own rules (though they’re not — they don’t say the passive may never be used, only that active constructions tend to be more forceful). But they don’t claim that their examples are all in the passive voice. Excessive deployment of the passive is only one of the weaknesses they discuss in this section. Their point is not only to urge the use of the active voice but to encourage the use of “active” transitive verbs rather than limp declarations of being. It’s sound advice: “dead leaves covered the ground” really is more forceful and better than “there were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.”
One can fairly complain that Strunk and White perceive the threat to good style as coming from only one direction. Consider their next section, in which they command, “Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.” “Denial,” “evasion,” “colorless” — these are tendentious terms. Someone who takes the authors’ advice too literally will always write fortissimo, without any understanding of the uses and virtues of the pianissimo. Irony, impartiality, subtlety, and negation do have a place in good writing. And bad prose can be Stentorian just as it can be anodyne, though admittedly most writers, especially in academia, err on the mushy side.
There are times when the negative construction is superior to a positive one: the negative can convey irony (and thereby emphasis) in a way that a straightforward positive cannot. And sometimes the weakness of a negative construction suggests a meaning different from (and subtler than) a positive construction, as Strunk and White’s second example shows: “He did not think that studying Latin was much use” (bad). “He thought the study of Latin useless” (good). The latter is more forceful, but the two sentences do not mean the same thing. The former allows the possibility that the subject thinks the study of Latin is of some utility, however limited. The latter asserts that he thinks it is of no utility at all. Greater force is not always to be preferred over subtler meaning.
The Elements of Styleis a stuffy book, as most rulebooks are, but its faults lie less with Strunk and White’s text than with pedants’ mindless misapplication of its rules. I’ve encountered a few terrible simplifiers whose horror of negative constructions is so great that they think all litotes a sin. But I wouldn’t lay that on Strunk and White, who in any event stand acquitted of Pullum’s charges.