On recommendation, I bought ‘The Elements of Style’ by William Strunk. I was hoping for an easy guide to grammar which I could refer to; what I got was confusion but some resolution on my own writing style.
Before I get into my general discussion, I’d like to note that I’m not pretending to be a perfect grammarist (in fact, that last word is probably made up). I do however like words, both reading them and writing them. Although my grammar and punctuation isn’t perfect, I do have preferences for style. Bear in mind then that anything I write here is inherently flawed.
The first thing that triggered my sense that ‘The Elements of Style’ (henceforth known as EoS) may have shortcomings for me was only a short way into it. On my walk to work, folded book in hand, I got to the bit on possessive apostrophes and it gave me pause for thought. I have always written names like ‘Charles’ with no extra ‘s’ in the possessive. E.g. Charles’ bag. Strunk insists it should be Charles’s bag. Never one to accept the word even of someone held in high esteem like Strunk, I went straight to the internet to check. The Cambridge English Dictionary proved to me that, at least in British English, the book was not necessarily going to tell me the correct grammar for my country.
When I got home, having finished my read on the walk back from work, I dug out my copy of ‘Gwynne’s Grammar’ by N.M. Gwynne. I had read a great deal of it but was curious if it contradicted Strunk. To my surprise, the book included a version of EoS edited by Gwynne. Gwynne, in his own writing, includes the possessive apostrophe as I would and yet left Strunk’s s’s paragraph untouched. That is not something I quite understand.
Gwynne also edited EoS with a paragraph on the Oxford Comma (though Strunk does not call it such) to say it is bad British English. Personally, the matter of the Oxford Comma is one of sensibility and indeed, one either excludes it and creates doubt, or includes it and provides clarity. I know which I prefer.
A chapter of EoS that Gwynne excludes is a list of commonly misspelt words. The list itself is exactly what I would expect of it. There is one sentence below however, that reads “Write to-day, to-night, tomorrow (sic)… with a hyphen.” Some cursory research online suggests this manner of writing words fell out of favour about seventy years ago, at least in Britain. If it is the same in the USA (and I presume that it is, from what I could find online), I wonder then why Strunk’s book is still published as is, as if his way is the right way when most have thrown off this manner.
There is a paragraph at the beginning of the chapter on spelling on how spellings fall in and out of favour, with some eventually becoming archaic. No-one ever seems to say this about grammar though, not Strunk and not Gwynne (that I remember, I could be wrong, it’s been a while!). There were certain sections in the book as I read that I remember thinking ‘that just doesn’t sound right though’. I doubt anyone’s usual speaking or writing voices are grammatically perfect, but I feel like there is something to be said for common usage and therefore common understanding.
One particular bugbear I have is with Strunk’s example corrections to sentences with poor grammar and how they are, well, boring. He does admit that writing in active voice all the time can be dull, with passive voice bringing interest, yet I cannot always help but consider his correction to be objectively worse. Perhaps not grammatically worse but, in terms of interest or attractiveness, less interesting. I’ll concede that writing constantly in passive voice would be frustrating. Many a poor author has been a demonstrator of this, and has had readers put off because of it. That sentence just then was in passive voice, an active voice version would be such: Many a poor author demonstrates this, and put readers off because of it. That example is fine, but my opinions on this matter do not just relate to his examples of voice, but also to splitting infinitives and a number of other things.
So I consider then that perhaps bending the rules of grammar (or outright breaking them) is what can make some writing interesting. Anyone that has read ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel will know that her speech unmarked by quotes can be challenging initially, but it is identifiably her style. Strunk tells us to avoid extra words, but I doubt The Lord of the Rings would be better books with fewer words.
Honestly, until I picked up ‘The Elements of Style’ I believed in the true rigidity of grammar rules, that they are what they are, not to be broken. Somehow, a grammar book has thrown me from this hill and now I find myself meandering along grammar possibility. That is not to say I threw out all I read. While writing this I did edit my wording several times because of things that were included in EoS, and arguably it improved what I wrote. I’m not saying all grammar is pointless, what I’m saying is that there is more to writing than grammar.
Somewhere, a grammar purist is reading this blog post shaking their head at my errors, and getting upset at my conclusion. Does not all good writing (or even bad) writing generate feeling? If mine gets it from grammar frustration in someone, that’ll do for now!