I promised friends to no longer be morose,depressed, etc etc. I will keep that promise but only as a companion. I’ll grieve in private (at least in my private space, the blog), I’ll be snarky only here!
I’ll be damned haha finally someone speaking something I have long been fucked about. Well I’ve read the elements of style book and I never got the way people seem to treat it as a kind of writing bible. I’ve always been a find your voice, something is wrong until something proves it right. Read something from DFW and I’d bet you he’d brake 5-10 commandments in a single 500-1000 word essay! The fact is, the reason I am riling against them is the Expert effect. See, I hear a lot of people who seem to want to abrogate their ability to reason, to think; Nooooo, people would rather take the easy way out and let other think for themselves. They’d rather reverberate something and sound smart, rather than(I probably am guilty of this) try to find that which they themselves thought about, no matter how awful.
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. … 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. …
Both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.
via Overcoming Bias: Fake Grammar Experts.
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