Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [20]
Because punctuation makes sentence shapes visible, you should also know the basics of punctuation. In particular, learn the primary rules governing commas. (No, the fact that you pause is not a reliable indicator.) See the short guide to punctuation early in Chapter 19.
Once you orient yourself toward thinking about the shapes of sentences, you will be able to use sentences that clarify for readers the way you organize your ideas and place emphasis. You will maximize your choices and increase your persuasive power. When analyzing the sentences of others, this knowledge will give you insight into the writer’s thinking: how the ideas are ranked and connected.
As for error-catching, you can revise and correct your draft once you’ve given yourself the opportunity to discover what you want to say. And, as we have been suggesting here, instead of dwelling on errors, try to cultivate an interest in the shapes of good sentences. See “go-to” sentence in Chapter 2, which will tell you how to use the grammar and style unit to start recognizing the connections between the characteristic shapes of a writer’s sentences and the way he or she thinks.
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 in “The Phenomenon of the Little Book: Letters to E.B. White on The Elements of Style,” an unpublished talk by Katherine K. Gottschalk, given at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication, pp. 5–6).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