Reading time: about 8 minutes
I did not want to write this essay. I wanted to get back into writing fiction. I just bought a new course with this whole Couch-to-10k style plan to turn me into a blockbuster genre writer. I am ON BOARD. I am COMMITTED. This is going to be great!
My first to-do on the list for this month: Read Strunk & White. Ha! I bought my copy of Strunk & White in high school. Strunk & White has been my faithful companion for decades. It settled debates in college. I brandished it in smug superiority to that idiot boss I had that one time that tried to tell me my grammar was wrong. I have given it a place of honor on my desk at every tech writer job. I haven’t read it in a while, actually—grad school was seven years ago, and I think it’s languished since then. So this morning I was supposed to peruse my bookshelves for my copy and settle in with it for a bit.
Except it’s gone. I can’t find it. At some point in the last seven years, my faithful companion has forsaken me.
{Some background for those who weren’t aspiring writers in the late ‘80s: The book I am referring to is actually called The Elements of Style, by William Strunk & E. B. White. It’s been around for over a century, and since roughly the 1930s has been considered the standard for what constitutes good writing in the US. It’s got some common grammar slip-ups to avoid, and in very authoritarian language lays down exactly how one should craft their writing: precisely, concisely, clearly, directly, without frill or ornament, and for the love of good taste, never in passive voice. Strunk & White sliding its way into the classroom was how we got the No-style style in the early 2000s that we have yet to escape. And I honestly am not sure why the writing community calls it Strunk & White instead of The Elements of Style—I don’t know why or when I started calling it that too.}
There’s nothing for it, it’s simply not anywhere in the house. My local Half Price Books has a used copy, the same edition I bought new in high school—thank goodness, because the thought of having one with a different cover makes me vaguely nauseous. But that edition is the third edition, and there have been multiple editions since then. Was it improved at all in the 30+ years since I bought it? I looked on Wikipedia to see.
“Criticism of Strunk & White has largely focused on claims that it has a prescriptivist nature, or that it has become a general anachronism in the face of modern English usage.”
Criticism of Strunk & White? Such a thing exists? Wikipedia continues:
“In criticizing The Elements of Style, Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), said that:
The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules ... 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.[19]
Pullum has argued, for example, that the authors misunderstood what constitutes the passive voice, and he criticized their proscription of established and unproblematic English usages, such as the split infinitive and the use of which in a restrictive relative clause.[19] On Language Log, a blog about language written by linguists, he further criticized The Elements of Style for promoting linguistic prescriptivism and hypercorrection among Anglophones, and called it "the book that ate America's brain".[20]
The Boston Globe's review described The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005), with illustrations by Maira Kalman, as an "aging zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice".[21]”
Oh wow. Ok. It’s actually wrong? I mean the dated part I get. If I take five seconds to think about who wrote it (a white male college professor at one of the Ivies) and when it was written (when the only professors allowed to professor at all were white males).
Oh, shit. You don’t suppose that….pulling up Google now……
College courses and professors often – usually – ask for logocentric writing, writing focused on the individual writer staking their claim in the “they say/I say” format, and college writing tends to favor a stance of “neutrality,” “objectivism,” and reason in the classical Western sense.
These expectations for languaging in college come from the habits of white language (HOWL, see post 28) historically structured in our schools, disciplines, and professions. They circulate as criteria for good languaging in those places because of the elite white people who established and maintained such places through history, people like the CCSS validation committee and those they reference in their appendix, people like Bryan Gardner, William Strunk, E.B. White, Gerald Graff, Neil Postman, Joseph M. Williams, Lawrence McEnerney, Maxine Hairston, and Richard Fulkerson.
I name these scholars not because they are bad people. They are not, quite the opposite. I name them because I wish to call attention to their whiteness, and how difficult it is to escape that whiteness. They are all white and draw primarily on habits of white language, white epistemologies and rhetorics of coloniality that create relations of domination for students of color and other minoritized students. These relations harm all of us, even those who are from elite white groups, only the harm is different for them.
- Asao B. Inoue, Decolonizing Our Languaging (emphasis added)
Shitshitshitshitshitshit
{To be 10000000% honest, while looking over the future assignments in this writing course, I did notice that the two white guys who created it had assigned an awful lot of craft books written by white guys. 22.5 out of 28, in fact. The rest are by white women and 1 Asian guy. I was already thinking of making some substitutions before this rabbit hole happened—they recommend On Writing by Stephen King, and I’ve read that book and it did nothing for me. I haven’t read Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering The Craft, however, so I was thinking of reading that instead. Are there more writing craft books by people of color and non-male types? Why indeed there are! Here are two lists that I plan to use to help me either sub out or read alongside books recommended by my new course: Writers of Color Discussing Craft - An Invisible Archive and A ‘How to Write’ Craft Syllabus From Non-White, Non-Cis Writers.}
Ok, well, that’s bad, but were Strunk and White intentionally bad? Yes. Yes they were.
Dreyer's English, by Benjamin Dreyer, the Senior Copy Editor for Random House, and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style are two extraordinarily popular and commercially successful guides to English language usage that belong to a genre best described as discursive maps for language as racialized, classed and gendered territory. This review traces the history of these books to the nineteenth century "conversation handbooks" and etiquette guides that became popular in a time of shifting class boundaries. Precise prescriptives for behavior and for polite conversation helped the aspirational middle-class groom themselves for genteel company. Many of these guides were published during the Reconstruction Era, and were filled with dispositions toward correct language that communicate a kind of outrage from fear of social, cultural and economic dispossession, a telltale mark of White Supremacy. These dispositions still exist in the rhetoric of both Dreyer and E.B. White and are carried through the structural racism of standardized English into educational spaces.
- Laura Lisabeth, White Fears of Dispossession: Dreyer’s English, The Elements of Style, and the Racial Mapping of English Discourse
Fuck you, colonialism. Just…..fuck you.
{If you’re thinking something along the lines of how can grammar be racist? Which I get, because it seems a little like how can math be racist, it’s just numbers? Then I refer you to this excellent blog post about it by Asao B. Inoue: Still Resistances to Believing in White Language Supremacy.}
So here I am, not buying a new copy of my formerly beloved Strunk & White, not doing fiction writing exercises. I’m writing this essay and I’m scouring Google for some sort of grammar and / or writing style books that are decolonized. Does such a thing even exist? After much searching, there’s not really (that I can find) a similar grammar and style book that stands in refutation of Strunk & White (linguists, help us writers out!). But from this excellent Books on Craft list by Kiana Shaley I’ve decided to not overthink (too much) and sub in How Dare We! Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse, 2nd Edition, an anthology with some essays specifically on “The Tyranny of Grammar.” There are also essays about writing as a multicultural / multiracial person, and I daresay those will be far more helpful to me than a racist 125+ year old manual on how to sound rich and white.
While I’m feeling good about the decision, I’m sad about Strunk & White. I’m sad that it was created out of a fear of potential equality. I’m sad that I trusted it, that I was told to trust it, that I am still being told to trust it, when in truth it’s apparently full of errors and teaching me correct grammar and style was never really the point of its existence. I’m sad that I’ve had a million conversations over the years about why No-style style is the worst while still upholding Strunk & White as gospel and never questioning that dichotomy that might have led me to the truth earlier. I’m sad that it feels like there is no corner of our culture that isn’t infected with the sickness of colonial hegemony. I miss the certainty I felt knowing its rules and applying them.
But maybe those rules helped hold me back from expressing myself and feeling comfortable telling my stories all these years? And maybe it’s ok to be sad while still embracing a better way forward.
I guess we’ll see where my style goes from here. Thank you all for going on this journey with me today.
💖💖💖,
Elnora
I appreciate the way you captured your journey from getting information you hadn't considered and chasing that information to a new conclusion. Also, all the resources! I'm going to look into a bunch of these, and want to add "Writing the Other" by Nisi Shaw and Cynthia Ward. It's not a grammar book BUT it's a really good text for how to go about writing characters with identities the writer doesn't have a lived experience of. Part of it is about language and pitfalls of stereotyping to look for and avoid.
Much appreciation for your call out on the self-appointed guardians of english grammar. I'm also very appreciative for all the resources and links you provided. Yes, we're long overdue for a discussion and re-evaluation regarding who decides what correct english is.
I've read Le Guin's "Steering the Craft" and appreciate her guidance. Samuel Delaney is another writer that I want to seek guidance from because I admire his wondrous use of language. He captured my fandom with Babel-17.
Your internal distress over having to throw over a formerly respected icon of English writing, reminds me of a scene from the graphic novel "The Invisibles" where the heroic characters are informed that... "You were never taught the all the letters of the TRUE alphabet, so we can say things that affect you.... like THIS."
Check out this dope and rather massive essay which includes some pages. Skip ahead to Figure 8 & 9 where THAT revelation is dropped on them like a mind-bomb.
https://imagetextjournal.com/language-and-thought-in-the-invisibles/