Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [20]
A QUICK WORD ON STYLE GUIDES
Style guides are fine, provided they don’t acquire the status of law, which is to say that you shouldn’t take them as offering the last word. Some style guides have acquired almost cult status—Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, for example. Among E.B. White’s letters, now collected at Cornell University, are many in which White is clearly responding with discomfort to letter writers appealing to him as the ultimate authority on style.
In one letter, he writes, “There are no rules of writing (who could possibly invent them?); there are only guidelines, and the guidelines can, and should be, chucked out the window whenever they get in your way or in your hair. I have never paid the slightest attention to ‘The Elements of Style’ when I was busy writing. […] If the book inhibits you or constrains you, you should build a bonfire and throw the book into the flames” (qtd. in “The Phenomenon of the Little Book: Letters to E.B. White on The Elements of Style,” an unpublished talk by Katherine K. Gottschalk, given at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication, pp. 5–6).
In an entertaining article by Catherine Prendergast, we also learn that Elements of Style was found among other do-it-yourself manuals on the bookshelf of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber (“The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk and White,” College English, Volume 72, Number 1, September 2009).
The problem with subscribing to one set of style “rules” is that this practice ignores rhetoric and context. There simply is no one set of rules that is appropriate for all occasions. In his essay, “Style and Good Style,” philosophy professor Monroe Beardsley takes this point one step further. He writes: “Many charming, clever, and memorable things have been said about style—most of which turn out to be highly misleading when subjected to analysis”(4). Changes in style, says Beardsley, always produce changes in meaning: “If the teacher advises a change of words, or of word order, he is recommending a different meaning” (13).
Here is one of the examples Beardsley offers in his measured attack on the rules in Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Strunk and White, offering the common stylistic advice that writers should seek to replace forms of “to be” with active verbs, suggest that the sentence “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” should be replaced with “Dead leaves covered the ground.” Of this suggested change, Beardsley observes, “But isn’t that a difference in meaning? For one thing, there are more leaves in the second sentence. The second one says that the ground was covered; the first one only speaks of a great number. Stylistic advice is a rather odd sort of thing if it consists in telling students to pile up the leaves in their descriptions” (6).
Similarly, the usual advice that writers should avoid the “not-un” formation produces not just a change in style but a change in meaning. Saying “I am not unhappy” is not the same thing as saying “I am happy”—which is the kind of bolder, more decisive statement that Elements of Style recommends.
So, style guides are useful provided you recognize that style guidelines always carry with them an unstated preference for a certain kind of approach to the world— a certain kind of speaking persona, which may or may not be suited to what you wish to say. Richard Lanham’s very useful “paramedic method,” which we discuss in Chapter 18, puts a lot of emphasis on active verbs, the active voice, and on reducing “Latinate” diction. This emphasis produces a vigorous style but one that is not consistent, for example, with the stylistic conventions of science writing.
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