Beware the Don’t-Do-This Brigade
There are thousands—probably tens of thousands—of books, pamphlets, and websites devoted to telling writers how to write better. And it is noticeable that many of them, instead of analyzing what makes good writing good, content themselves with listing things they say you should steer clear of.
The things they pick on are always fairly common, of course, because if nobody feels inclined to actually use some form of words it will never catch the eye of the self-appointed writing gurus. No writing guide tells you to avoid typing every word twice (writing writing like like this this), because nobody would dream of doing it, which means you never encounter it.
The expressions they warn you against occur in prose that you will read every day, but you are supposed to take it on faith from writing advisers that you should rise above those other writers and avoid writing the way they write. Simon Heffer (in the preface to Strictly English, 2010) says quite explicitly: “I happen to believe that the ‘evidence’ of how I see English written by others, including some professional writers, is not something by which I wish to be influenced.”
This is the exact opposite of what good foreign language teachers, or for that matter dance instructors, will insist on. They will try to get you to pay close attention to the people who speak the language you are trying to learn, or dance the way you want to be able to dance, and follow their example.
Yet in the more old-fashioned writing guides you will find warnings against beginning sentences with ‘And’ (extremely common, and seen in the second sentence of this article), or ending sentences with a preposition (also seen in my second sentence), or placing an adverb after ‘to’ (as in my third sentence). Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style even goes so far as to tell you to avoid writing “some such perfunctory expression as there is”—deprecating existential clauses, as in my opening sentence.
The assumption is that some phrases or types of sentence that naturally occur to experienced writers or speakers must nonetheless be shunned: Though frequently occurring, they are in some way unsavory or imperfect or objectionable—it’s never quite clear what adjective would capture the nature of the objection, but when pressed to go beyond mere personal preferences or peeves they will say that the things they deprecate are forbidden by rules of grammar.
My book The Truth About English Grammar provides a no-prerequisites introduction to some of the basic principles of grammar, and because I often have to note that the how-to-write people often have no grammatical leg to stand on, one reviewer in Britain declared that I am “always on the side of the ordinary Joe against the nitpickers.”
Check out Geoffrey K. Pullum’s The Truth About English Grammar here:
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That is the familiar stereotype of the careful descriptive grammarian: a kind of 1960s anarchist who says “If it feels good, do it.” And that is not my view at all. This ordinary Joe character, whoever he may be, will get no leniency from me if he’s wrong: I’m trying to state clearly what the most basic rules of English grammar are, and heaven forfend that you should violate them simply because you feel like it.
But I do sometimes have to stress that writers should largely write the way other writers have written, not the way writing tutors think they should. Because if the rules of English grammar aren’t based on what we find in good literature and the best journalism, there is no basis for saying they are the rules of English.
Here’s an example. If you have a clear enough understanding of basic grammar to know what an adverb is (and I do try to provide a clear definition backed up with illustrative examples), then you should be aware that people talk nonsense about such words, demanding that you should shun them.
“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” says E.B. White—an outrageous suggestion that no writer follows. “Most adverbs are unnecessary,” declares William Zinsser in On Writing Well (1976)—as if blind to the vital role of the third word in his title and vast numbers of the other adverbs he uses. Stephen King (On Writing, 2000) goes so far as to assert that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs”—though he makes no attempt to get off that downbound road in his own brilliant horror writing, which is as liberally graced with adverbs as other competent writing.
Having a reasonably sound grasp of the basic concepts of grammar will not turn a poor writer into a brilliant one, but it does provide the key advantage of enabling a writer to see that these famous writing mavens are spouting nonsense.
And so are all the hundreds of writing advisors and teaching assistants who, since early in the 20th century, have railed against passive clauses. Frequently they don’t do well on recognizing passives: The concept is often confused with the notion of being somehow evasive about agency or responsibility. “Mistakes were made” is the go-to example, repeated ad nauseam in writing guides, and it is indeed a passive clause (of the short agentless kind, with no by-phrase); but people often make the mistake of thinking that “Mistakes occurred” is passive too (it certainly avoids naming the culprits, but it isn’t a passive).
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Passives get lambasted as dull, wordy, slow, and boring. This is hogwash. If you know how to recognize one, and you pick up the very first Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child (Killing Floor, 1997), you’ll find it begins: “I was arrested in Eno’s diner.” Stark, dramatic, intriguing: Why was our protagonist arrested? Who was accusing him, and of what? The novel opens with a perfectly judged passive because Lee Child has been reading books avidly since he was old enough to walk to the local library in Birmingham. He knows how English works.
Child chose exactly the sort of sentence that the enemies of the passive insist you should avoid. And soon other passives appear in the text, like “I was walked to the door” on the second page (Reacher didn’t stride to the door, he was walked with his arms held, like a toddler or a drunk, by four armed Georgia cops). Child knows what he’s doing as a writer. He deploys adverbs and passive clauses and all the other resources English offers, whatever is exactly right for the job. He doesn’t listen to the don’t-do-this brigade. And he went on from Killing Floor to sell a hundred million books.