Intellectual Property Law

Down with Strunk & White

By Mike Madison

Geoff Pullum, linguist and (among other things) contributor to the magnificent Language Log,  has a sharp critique of Strunk & White at the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the publication of their little book:

It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write “however” or “than me” or “was” or “which,” but can’t tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

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Send the whole thing to your students, colleagues, and/or favorite law review editors.

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on April 14, 2009 (boomark / email).