Effects of Media: Writing — The Shifting Style of Elements

[Explor­ing Life] The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion recently pub­lished 50 Years of Stu­pid Gram­mar Advice in response to the release of the com­mem­o­ra­tive edi­tion of Strunk and White’s famous The Ele­ments of Style.[1] The arti­cle con­demns Strunk and White’s advice as being detri­men­tal to the cor­rect use of lan­guage as well as the devel­op­ment of a writ­ing style. After read­ing the arti­cle it occurred to me that the tacit issue under­neath the accu­rate crit­i­cisms of The Ele­ments of Style are more basic ques­tions that edu­ca­tion sys­tems strug­gle with” How do we learn a “writ­ing style?” How do we write with “style?” Is there some­thing we can call “a cor­rect style?” What really is a “writ­ing style?“

Gram­mar is a focus within lin­guis­tics that aims to pro­vide sets of rules and prin­ci­ples for the use of lan­guage. In order to accom­plish a gram­mar­ian will study var­i­ous uses of lan­guage in order to iden­tify struc­tural con­sis­ten­cies that are promi­nent enough to base a rule or prin­ci­ple on. In other words, estab­lish the rules of gram­mar is an exer­cise in analy­sis. The rules and prin­ci­ples become the basis for cre­at­ing a cur­ricu­lum, or course of study, designed to “help” stu­dents to learn bet­ter lan­guage practices.

Pul­lum con­tends that:

The Ele­ments of Style does not deserve the enor­mous esteem in which it is held by Amer­i­can col­lege grad­u­ates. Its advice ranges from limp plat­i­tudes to incon­sis­tent non­sense. Its enor­mous influ­ence has not improved Amer­i­can stu­dents’ grasp of Eng­lish gram­mar; it has sig­nif­i­cantly degraded it… This was most unfor­tu­nate for the field of Eng­lish gram­mar, because both authors were gram­mat­i­cal incom­pe­tents. (Pul­lam, 2009)

Style refers to the way in which some­thing is expressed. A writer’s style is sim­i­lar to a jazz musician’s style; both are unique cre­ative expres­sions of an indi­vid­ual. Style, unlike gram­mar, does not have “rules” though we may describe char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­tures. I believe that a writer’s style emerges over time, not through the acqui­si­tion of rules, but through con­stant exper­i­men­ta­tion and improviza­tion with the writ­ten lan­guage. Read­ing the work of other authors as a source of inspi­ra­tion expands the cre­ative ground upon which style emerges.

Mas­ter­ing gram­mar does not facil­i­tate the emer­gence of style; a cre­ative style is not always gram­mat­i­cally correct.

Edu­ca­tion has an unfor­tu­nate ten­dency toward ana­lyt­i­cal reduc­tion. This is the fun­da­men­tal and fatal assump­tion of cur­ricu­lum. Once an expe­ri­ence or phe­nom­e­non is reduced enough, it can then be sequenced into a form of instruc­tion. The stu­dent is then to “learn” the reduc­tion­ist per­spec­tive, largely by rote and other lower level think­ing skills, in order to meet a pre­de­ter­mined and imposed stan­dard of per­for­mance. If the stu­dent is suc­cess­ful in “pass­ing” the stan­dard of per­for­mance, it is then assumed they have “learned” the con­tent, or have been “edu­cated” in some man­ner. The entire process is misguided.

If the intent of an aca­d­e­mic is to study gram­mar as a dis­ci­pline then knowl­edge of the pre­sumed rules of gram­mar is essen­tial. If the intent of a per­son is to become a bet­ter writer then knowl­edge of var­i­ous author’s writ­ing style is essen­tial. It is pos­si­ble for a per­son to mas­ter the rules of gram­mar with­out improv­ing their abil­ity to cre­atively express them­selves through writing.

The Ele­ments of Style

The most basic ele­ments of style orig­i­nate in artistry. Impro­vi­sa­tion is a basic process com­mon to all artis­tic devel­op­ment. Learn­ing the ele­ments of a style means to be inspired enough by another writer that the urge to impro­vise on the theme of their style is unavoid­able. By “play­ing” with the con­tent of another writer, the stu­dent explores their own sen­si­bil­i­ties in rela­tion to a source of inspiration.

Notice what I am object­ing to is not the style advice in Ele­ments, which might best be described the way The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes Earth: mostly harm­less. Some of the rec­om­men­da­tions are vapid, like “Be clear” (how could one dis­agree?). Some are tau­tol­o­gous, like “Do not explain too much.” (Explain­ing too much means explain­ing more than you should, so of course you shouldn’t.) Many are use­less, like “Omit need­less words.” (The stu­dents who know which words are need­less don’t need the instruc­tion.) Even so, it doesn’t hurt to lay such well-meant max­ims before novice writ­ers. (Pul­lum, 2009)

If an explo­ration of style is lim­ited to analy­sis, then the process remains uncre­ative and imper­sonal. There is noth­ing wrong with estab­lish­ing rules, as long as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple is using those rules is to find cre­ative ways to rise above them. If every writer blindly adhered to a com­mon set of gram­mat­i­cal rules, artistry and cre­ative expres­sion would become stunted and mundane.

The teach­ing of lit­er­acy is one the great­est imped­i­ments to the devel­op­ment of style. Lit­er­acy, like gram­mar, is based on a closely held and myopic set of assump­tions that enve­lope an expe­ri­ence in analy­sis and reduc­tion­ism. The is an illu­sive pre­sump­tion of a “cor­rect” way and we sup­pose that being lit­er­ate equates to being bet­ter equipped in the skills of read­ing and writ­ing. While it is only obvi­ous to say that a basic level of lit­er­acy is required in order to acquire lan­guage pro­fi­ciency, it is incor­rect to pre­sume that rote ana­lyt­i­cal learn­ing will make a per­son “lit­er­ate.” Style rises above the ana­lyt­i­cal and pushes toward cre­ative synthesis.

The Cre­ation of Style

To push the bound­aries of writ­ten expres­sion, regard­less of our phase of devel­op­ment, means to attend to the cre­ation of style. Pul­lum states that he does not object to Strunk and White’s advice regard­ing style, but does indi­cate that a great deal of this advice is harm­less, vapid, or use­less rep­e­ti­tions of com­mon knowl­edge. Though I have used The Ele­ments of Style in the past, I must con­cur with Pul­lum that the book fun­da­men­tally mis­guided. Even more shock­ing is the seem­ingly blind accep­tance of it as a trusted source in higher education.

Lin­guists, gram­mar­i­ans, and teach­ers of writ­ing would pro­vide excep­tion­ally more ben­e­fit if they focused their pow­ers of per­cep­tion and insight on the most basic “ele­ments” of “style.” To do this, how­ever, (I could have writ­ten “How­ever, to do this…” or I could have not used “how­ever” — how­ever, I chose to use “how­ever”) requires a fun­da­men­tal shift aware­ness from analy­sis to cre­ative syn­the­sis. The real ele­ments of style exist in the inter­play of an author’s expe­ri­ences in life and how they cre­atively express those expe­ri­ences through writ­ing. What we read is merely the sur­face of style. The ele­ments of style, in this sense, are not merely some­thing that can be read.

Foot­notes

1. Pul­lum, Geof­frey. 50 Years of Stu­pid Gram­mar Advice. The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion. April 17, 2009.