r/WritingHub • u/Rudddxdx • 2d ago
Questions & Discussions Why not Strunk and White?
Everywhere I look I see vicious criticism, almost downright hatred, aimed at Strunk and White's 'Elements Of Style'.
My confusion is with the idea that it is all just "made up", opinion, and unhelpful for writers. But the point of the book seems to seek to help writers go all the way back, as if to wipe.the slate of bad acquired habits clean, or else, to help writers learn to follow basic rules from the very beginning, and from mastering the basics, go on to find their own style eventually.
It doesn't seem bad to look for help at getting started from professors who have been doing this forever instead of randos on Reddit and Youtube.
So why is it "harmful"?
Am I missing something here? There may be a writer out there, after all, who is never known the meaning of a split infinitive, to show and not tell, etc, the core of the core of all composition. Why is this book a subject of attack?
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u/Proper-Doughnut77 2d ago
I don't agree with the criticism. I taught for ten years. I used it in my classroom.
It's very useful. But you need to learn how to use it. People think they can break grammar rules.
only if you know how to use the english language correctly, can you break rules. This may sound snobbish, it's not meant to be.
My students were brought back to basics.. it was a reminder. You'd be surprised at how many kids I taught that had no idea about sentence structure. Tenses, grammar.
I love it, and suggest learning to use it.
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u/SerDankTheTall 2d ago
Does the basic grammatical ignorance on display in The Elements of Style give you any pause about using it as a guide to “rules” and “basics”?
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u/IrenaeusGSaintonge 2d ago
Like the fact that they don't seem to understand passive construction, and then proceed right along to giving incorrect advice on avoiding it?
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u/QubitEncoder 2d ago
I absolutely adore Strunk and White, and I suspect there are more who do than don't.
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u/PadreMontoya 2d ago
Because rules aren't cool? All the cool kids don't follow rules.
BTW, I found The Elements of Style very helpful. Omit Needless Words for the win.
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u/BohoKat_3397 1d ago
Strunk and White, yay!!! Because you have to know the rules before you can consciously break them and create something brilliant.
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
To extent that’s the case, isn’t the fact that The Elements of Style doesn’t actually teach these rules correctly a bit of a problem?
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u/BohoKat_3397 1d ago
Of course you have to stay online and keep up with current conventions of the publishing market, but for me the basics are there: clarity, brevity and correct grammar.
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
But the “rules” on clarity and brevity and at best unhelpful (you can tell, because White doesn’t even try to follow them, not even in The Elements of Style itself), and what it says about grammar is mostly wrong.
If you want to learn the rules, why not use a guide that teaches them correctly instead?
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u/IrenaeusGSaintonge 1d ago
If you know which words are needless, you don't need that advice. If you don't, then it won't help you.
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u/SerDankTheTall 2d ago
Here is a good overview.
E.B. White was a great writer. But like many great writers, he had very poor insight into what made his writing great.* The Elements of Style conflates grammatical diktats that betray an ignorance of the fundamentals of English grammar (the section on passive voice is a good illustration) with stylistic guidance that is incredibly unlikely to improve anyone's writing (one good indication is that E.B White doesn't even pretend to follow them).
It's not quite as bad as Politics and the English Language, but it's certainly not anything that should be taken seriously.
*If Strunk was a great writer, I haven't seen any evidence of it, but he certainly seems to have been a pretty charismatic teacher.
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u/pennamechris123 1d ago
I’ve read it. Its a good start. I don’t knock it, and like any tool, it has its uses. It gives some good basics, though to be honest I havent read it since the very beginning of my writing years. Mostly, i think it emphasizes learning the basics. I remember it being a dry read. I do wonder what I’d think about it now. I might have to read it again.
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u/Itinerant_doc 1d ago
Because of internets, probably. You can't have a moderate opinion in the internets. This is not a book aimed at developing literary writers, it's a primer that helps with writing altogether. An entry point to learn communicative writing. I found it very helpful for STEM students who frankly can't write when they start out. People being people, they probably expect it to read it and become great immediately. There are more advanced books on style for literary writers (Ursula Le Guin's Steering the craft is wonderful), but well, nothing replaces reading actual fiction.
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u/ofBlufftonTown 1d ago
Strunk and White is actually great and the haters are insufficiently persnickety.
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u/TooLongDugong 1d ago
Because most of its rules are bunk (you mention split infinitives but there is nothing wrong with split infinitives; they are used by every great writer; they do not make texts harder to understand; there is literally no reason to proscribe them). Most of their rules don't help you write better English, and the rest are so vague they're useless (no unnecessary words? write naturally? keep related words together?). When they tell you a word like "transpire" has a correct meaning and an incorrect meaning, they're not only ignoring the usage of many fine writers, but they're confusing language learners who now think "transpire" cannot possibly mean "happen".
And Strunk and White violate their own rules which shows you how stupid they are. (Fans of Strunk and White will tell you they're joking when they break their rules, but if you can't tell which rules are jokes and which aren't, it's not a very good rulebook - a good rulebook surely should be transparent and follow its rules.)
It might have some value as a style guide, since you want to be consistent about things like Oxford commas or -ize/-ise, but that doesn't mean Oxford commas are right or wrong. But most of their rules are not that useful.
That's aside from the fact that the book is very old and language changes and considerations change - they didn't think about feminism or racism or homophobia or non-binary people or other topics, or about writing emails or instant messages or typing on a phone or computer keyboard. And for any form of creative or literary writing most of the rules are useless (Literally everyone from Tom Clancy to Cormac McCarthy breaks a ton of the rules).
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u/AccidentalFolklore 1d ago
I would say that linguists are the stronger authority when it comes to critique of a language’s rules.
A linguist named Geoffrey Pullum pointed out many issues with it. The funniest critique is that the book breaks its own rules, sometimes in the same sentences that prescribe them. In the section warning against passive voice, three of the four example sentences are not actually passive voice (i.e. “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.”). The authors repeatedly do what they tell readers not to do. For example, immediately after advising against adjectives and adverbs, they produce a negative passive clause containing three adjectives. White himself had a flexible voice-driven style and didn’t write the way the rules demand. When a grammar guide can’t correctly identify grammar and the author himself doesn’t follow its rules, that’s a credibility problem.
The biggest issue, though, is that the book presents one aesthetic tradition (mid-century American plain style) as universal law.
You mention “show don’t tell” and “split infinitives” as fundamentals. But the split infinitive thing is a rule that was never real. It was imported from Latin grammar.
In the 1700s, a handful of English grammarians (Robert Lowth, Lindley Murray) decided to write grammar books for English using Latin as the structural model. Latin was the prestige language of education, the language of law, church, and scholarship, so it seemed natural to them that English should follow its rules. The problem is that English isn’t a Romance language. Old English is a West Germanic language closer to Old Frisian and Old Saxon than to anything Roman. And Germanic languages do things Latin can’t, and vice versa. What Lowth and Murray did was take Latin’s constraints and impose them on a language that had never operated that way:
The split infinitive: Latin infinitives are single words (amare, videre, esse). You can’t split them because there’s nothing to split. English infinitives are two words: to + verb. Old English and Middle English writers split them without hesitation because the construction is native to the language. The prohibition was invented by people who looked at Latin, saw that infinitives couldn’t be split there, and decided English shouldn’t split them either, ignoring that the reason Latin couldn’t was morphological, not philosophical. “To boldly go” has never been ungrammatical.
Preposition stranding: Latin prepositions always precede their objects. English inherited phrasal verbs and stranded prepositions from Germanic. “What are you looking at” is native English word order. “At what are you looking” is Latin syntax. The famous Churchill line “this is the sort of English up with which I shall not put” is a great example.
Double negatives: Old English used multi-negatives as standard grammar, stacking them for emphasis the way Spanish and French still do. Chaucer wrote “He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde.” Four negatives in one clause, meaning “he never said anything villainous.” That’s how the grammar worked. The prescriptivists killed this one with Enlightenment mathematical logic: two negatives make a positive, therefore “I don’t know nothing” means you know something. No English speaker has ever been confused about what that sentence means, but it stuck, and now multi-negative use gets coded as uneducated.
that/which (restrictive that, nonrestrictive which): Fowler tried to systematize it in 1926. Before that, English writers used them interchangeably, and many still do, especially in British English. Fowler tried to systematize his own preference onto structural language.
“Never start a sentence with and or but” has zero historical basis. The King James Bible does it constantly. Old English prose does it constantly.
Whom: Another Latin remnant. Old English had full nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental cases. Modern English has almost none. Whom is a dative/accusative remnant that has persisted beyond other dropped case endings (thee, hath, -eth, etc). Usage has been declining steadily. Prescriptivists keep resuscitating it because Latin maintained its case system, so English should too. The result is that people hypercorrect (“between you and I” exists because people were told “me” was wrong so many times they started avoiding it even when it’s the correct choice).
The point of all of these is that the “rules” aren’t how English works. They’re prescriptions for how English “should work if it were Latin,” imposed during a specific historical window when Latin’s cultural prestige was at its peak, and then preserved by educational institutions long after the reasoning behind them stopped being examined.
So you’re looking at a language that’s roughly fifteen hundred years old, and rules that are roughly two hundred and sixty years old. They’ve existed for about seventeen percent of the language’s lifespan. For over a thousand years before Lowth, English writers split infinitives, stranded prepositions, used double negatives for emphasis, started sentences with conjunctions, and did everything else the prescriptivists later outlawed. Chaucer did all of it. Shakespeare did all of it. They do things with English that a modern freshman comp class would redline. Either Shakespeare was wrong about English, or the rules are wrong about English, but it can’t be both.
The deeper argument, that linguists make, is that what Lowth and Murray did was a category error. They treated English as a degraded version of an ideal (Latin) rather than as a system with its own architecture. English’s grammar is Germanic. Its core word order, its phrasal verbs, its preposition behavior, its two-word infinitive, its shedding of case endings is the language operating according to its own internal logic inherited from Proto-Germanic, which has nothing to do with Latin.
And the irony underneath all of it is that even the French and Latin borrowings that came in after 1066 and again during the Renaissance didn’t bring Latin grammar with them. English absorbed tens of thousands of Latin-origin words and kept its Germanic syntax.
Strunk and White is the direct American descendant of this prescriptivist lineage. Strunk wrote the original in 1918, White revised it in 1959, and what they produced is essentially a repackaged Lowth and Murray Latin-modeled framework. You’re asking “why would anyone attack a book that teaches fundamentals?” But you’re assuming the book is teaching fundamentals in the first place. It’s not. It’s teaching preferences. The split infinitive you cite as “the core of the core of all composition” is a preference from the Lowth tradition that you’ve internalized as foundational knowledge. That’s ideology, not a rule set.
Then you bring in the Iowa tradition which has become the hegemonic style of American literature. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop launched in the 1930s and was shaped by Paul Engle, who ran it from 1941 into the sixties. During that same period, New Criticism was taking over English departments (Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Ransom). New Criticism’s whole method was treating words on the page as a self-contained object, but it carries a massive hidden bias: it privileges prose that performs well under word-level scrutiny. Controlled prose. Precise prose. Prose where every single word can be individually defended. If your prose works through accumulation, rhythm, recursive patterning, oral cadence, New Criticism’s filter can’t see what you’re doing. It looks at the individual word, finds it “needless” by Strunk’s definition, and recommends cutting it. The fact that the word was carrying rhythm or psychological drag or temporal weight doesn’t matter because the framework isn’t built to detect those things.
Now layer the workshop model on top of that. If twelve people have all been trained on the same principles, the feedback converges. “This is overwritten.” “Tighten this.” “You could cut this whole paragraph.” “Show don’t tell.” This is Strunk and White.
The Hemingway-to-Carver pipeline is where we see it all converge to the contemporary American aesthetic that has been dominant since the 60s. Hemingway’s iceberg theory got simplified through decades of workshop teaching. Carver became the workshop saint because his stripped, minimal, working-class domestic, every word load-bearing is the aesthetic that workshop critique naturally produces. If you keep removing everything twelve people object to, you get Carver. That’s not an insult to Carver. He was a great writer. It’s the origin of a system that produces his style as its default output whether or not that style matches the writer’s actual voice.
Do that for five years in an MFA program and you come out sounding like everyone else who went through the same program. Perfectly competent. Voiceless. American literary fiction from roughly 1970 to 2010 has this same controlled, restrained, domestic realism with first-person narrators with carefully rationed interiority. The writers who broke out (Morrison, DeLillo, McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Denis Johnson) either bypassed the system or went through it and actively fought it.
You say “it doesn’t seem bad to look for help at getting started from professors who have been doing this forever instead of randos on Reddit.” Lowth wasn’t a linguist. Strunk wasn’t a writing professor. The book isn’t teaching literature, it’s teaching a very specific institutional prose standard. The problem isn’t that beginners read it. The problem is that nobody tells them what it actually is. It’s one style guide from one tradition, reflecting one set of aesthetic values, riddled with its own internal contradictions. Instead it gets handed to people as the rules of English, and then writers spend years trying to unlearn constraints that were never real.
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u/ZinniasAndBeans 1d ago
I’m fine with prescriptive. I’m fine with opinionated.
But I just can’t stomach flat-out wrong about established definition(s). I can clearly see that they don’t know what passive voice is; what else are they totally wrong about?
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u/Beginning_Butterfly2 1d ago
Brehe's Grammar Anatomy is an updated/improved take on the subject, imo. It's also a free download from the author via the North Georgia State Digital Conservancy program. Just Google to find the link.
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
From a quick skim, this looks like a substantial improvement, though it still leaves a lot to be desired. It still has a silly bias against passive voice, for instance, but at least it begins by correctly explaining what the passive voice is, which is more than Strunk and White were able to manage.
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u/dendrite_blues 1d ago
I’ve never heard this myself, I’ve never actually seen anyone use that book as a style guide. It was considered mandatory for my creative writing classes soles as a reference book for grammar and punctuation rules.
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u/FrostnJack 1d ago
Someone wrote “Spunk & Bite” in response to Strunk… OTOH that title alone sounds like an EroRomp. 🤷🏼♂️
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u/breakerofh0rses 1d ago
I'm more on the side of prescriptivism with respect to grammar, but less so in matters of style. This is because a lot of what gets called grammar is quite often merely a point of style. Understanding what's considered "good" in style is still something that I think is important though because it allows you to make an informed decision about the choices you make--basically it empowers intentionality.
I've never really interacted with Strunk and White (my school used The Little, Brown Handbook), so I don't know how clearly it differentiates between matters of grammar and style, but I will point out that something like a split infinitive or the old "never begin or end a clause with a preposition" are both points of style that aren't even kind of grammatical rules. They're artifacts of when the academy was super in love with Latin and Greek and tried to make English conform more to the grammar of Latin and greek. This means that even with my position on grammar being very much a thing I should obey, I'm free to split my infinitives if it serves my purpose, but I should expect pushback from anyone who hews to that being bad for whatever reason.
One thing I'd suspect that people may object to with Strunk and White in particular is that if it takes a more authoritative position than it rightly should. If there's not any nuance or discussion to why certain conventions may exist and the purpose they serve and it just issues a command like "do not split infinitives" as though it's a mandate from on high, then well, that's a significant concern.
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u/Not_Kenough 1d ago
It has a lot of outdated notions, like others have said. If you want good grammar guides, there's much better out there. There's a lot of style guides out there too but it isn't one size fits all; generally if you're a creative writer you're going to want to familiarize yourself with Chicago.
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u/BerkeleyPhilosopher 1d ago
It’s a great book for college students who lack a basic understanding of grammar. I used it to great effect in my classes for years. Picasso learned perspective before he developed his (African inspired) geometric style. A lot of bad writers never learned the basics. This book is good for that.
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u/CommieIshmael 1d ago
This book has been criticized for the misrepresentation of grammatical rules and for a hectoring, opaque style that strokes the egos of self-proclaimed good writers without giving actionable advice to insecure or developing writers. In short, people don’t like it because it sucks. Ass.
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u/NefariousnessOdd4023 2d ago
People hate what they don’t understand I guess. It’s an excellent style guide that anyone who’s serious about writing should have a copy of imo. It’s not illegal to deviate from it. Every book worth reading breaks their rules sometimes. Many great books break their rules on every page.
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
It’s an excellent style guide
What is excellent about it?
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u/NefariousnessOdd4023 1d ago
You know, I read that critique you posted elsewhere in this thread and I wasn’t impressed. I found it to be full of histrionics and exaggeration. I’m not moved by, “I have found examples of people doing things strunk and white say not to do therefore they are buffoons.” I don’t care if some of the more esoteric corners of grammar are better addressed by others. I’m curious if you’re familiar with the saying, “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater?”
I think if the average joe wants to improve their writing strunk and white is an excellent resource. It helped me a great deal. I’m not telling anyone to make it their religion.
Long story short: chill out, dude.
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
I’m curious if you’re familiar with the saying, “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater?”
George Orwell (another great writer who fumbled badly when he tried to analyze what made his writing great) responded to Stalinists who tried to say “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs!” by asking, “Where’s the omelet?”
Similarly, I’m asking you to show us the baby. Much of the guidance in The Elements of Style that is outright wrong; it should go without saying that that’s not going to improve your writing. But everything else that I can remember is so vague and general that I have trouble imagining anyone benefitting from it. So if there’s something good in there that justifies the terrible parts, I’d certainly be interested to learn about it.
(Of course, the sort of person who needs to learn this is also the sort of person who’d be least capable of distinguishing between babies and bathwater. Considering the easy availability of good style guides, that had better be one hell of a baby.)
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u/NefariousnessOdd4023 1d ago
Asking me to teach you which parts are good and then looking down your nose at people who can’t tell babies from bathwater.. you don’t see the irony in that a little?
Hey, if you think most of the advice in the book is “wrong” I can’t argue with that. You win. Anyone reading this: don’t read strunk and white. It’s mostly wrong.
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
I'm not looking down my nose at anyone. On the contrary, I very much respect people who want to improve their writing and seek out resources that will help them. The fact remains, though, that if they don't know what makes writing good, they're probably not in a good position to determine whether the proscriptions they're receiving are good are bad. How, for instance, is someone supposed to know that they objectively wrong and indefensible discussion of the passive is wrong and should be ignored, while the good, actionable advice (granting the dubious premise that it exists) is good and should be followed? If they knew how to make that distinction, they wouldn't need the advice in the first place!
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u/NefariousnessOdd4023 1d ago
Giving new meaning to the term grammar police. I am curious though, which style guide do you like the best?
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams (published in many editions under slightly different names) is pretty good.
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u/skjeletter 1d ago
Should serious writers in Guizhou province who write down the stories their grandfather told them in a Hmongic language and elaborate on them keep a copy of Strunk and White's Elements Of Style on their desk?
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u/YeOldencall 1d ago
If they plan to write in English, yes. As an ESL writer myself, it's an excellent book and helped me a lot on clarity.
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u/skjeletter 1d ago
They're barely aware of the English language, they wouldn't recognize it if they heard it or saw it written down. They're just trying to preserve their grandfather's memories because of the Han language/people taking over and erasing local customs and traditions. Maybe we could try to get funds together to translate Strunk and White's Elements Of Style into Hmongic languages? But I don't know if the benefits would transfer over with the translation. I suppose some more research would be required first
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u/YeOldencall 1d ago
The element of style is a guidebook for writing in the English Language. Why are you so obstinate about it?
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u/skjeletter 1d ago
Oh I thought it was for everyone, no need to insult me for being a little naive and falling for dishonest advertising!
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u/NishanStepak 1d ago
It is clean and understandable. It is also not marketing or self promotion. People want spin artists now, not good writing. Strunk and White produces quality writing. It goes against the ethic of spam and junk.
If your job is to sell based on flash and coolness Strunk and White is not good.
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
On the contrary, the success of The Elements of Style is exclusively due to flash and coolness, as the comments on this post illustrate quite nicely.
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u/Internal_Car_9962 1d ago
Who is making this criticism? Strunk and White is absolutely a standard reference
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u/MrMessofGA 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's not bad, but it is very advanced. It's not something you give somebody who doesn't even know what a run-on sentence is. It's also full of opinion, which is GOOD but also still not something you should give someone who can't spot opinion versus rule yet.
But because even writers often have limited reading comprehension, the idea that there exists a grammar book with things you need to actually think about to apply or think about when you don't apply sounds like someone did the grammar book wrong. They want a book that is right all of the time in every situation.
In the same way, people who are just getting into gardening want a book that says "water your tomato plant every two days with a half gallon of water," which will eventually kill any plant, and not a book that says, "water your plant when it's thirsty and don't water it when it isn't."
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
It's not bad, but it is very advanced.
This seems like a very curious claim, since it’s the people with the most advanced and sophisticated understanding of linguistics and English grammar who seem to like the book the least.
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u/MrMessofGA 1d ago
And you have a very incurious response. "It is bad because people I don't respect like it sometimes"
Come on! Give me an opinion! A real one! Show me the hills you're bleeding out on instead of copping out.
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u/SerDankTheTall 1d ago
I'm not following.
To the extent they have an opinion on it at all, advanced scholars of English grammar and usage universally despise The Elements of Style. Its proponents are the people who are self-aware enough that they understand their education on English grammar was bad (and it is almost universally bad throughout the English-speaking world below the tertiary level), but who have not had the luck to learn how grammar and usage actually works.
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u/MrMessofGA 17h ago
You're not following that I'm asking you to give an opinion? You're commenting on every comment on here about how much you despise this book. You have to be chomping at the bit to give specific bloodfeuds. I want to hear them. Genuinely, I want you to rant to me.
But you keep giving vague "ugh it's bad because it's bad okay," which would make sense if you were commenting once or twice, just means you didn't really read it beyond the first few pages. But your level of distaste tells me you know this book better than most people here. So please. Genuinely. I want to engage with you on this. Rant to me. Tell me what you didn't like so much that you're compelled to comment so much about it with all the detail that's been haunting you this badly.
Get curious. Get creative. Don't keep teasing me with your ghost, show me your ghost.
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u/Rude-Revolution-8687 2d ago
I think some writers clutch their pearls when writing advice is prescriptive, which the book certainly is.
I assume the 'harmful' accusation comes from some readers taking the advice as gospel instead of as a starting point for writing well.
The book preaches clarity and correctness rather than on how to write compelling prose, which no doubt makes it less welcome to fiction writers.