Elephants, snark, and usage advice
Mar. 21st, 2015 06:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI admit, I was prepared to be annoyed when I first picked up Bill Walsh’s The Elephants of Style, given that its name is a shout-out to what I’m pretty sure is the least helpful book on English usage in the language. (I know many people have found it helpful, but those people are not word nerds. If you say you found it helpful, I’m glad for you, but I’m also not going to view you as having any credibility if you start to try and talk language or writing stuff.) I was additionally apprehensive when Walsh started off by proclaiming himself a prescriptivist. But he assures us he is a reasonable prescriptivist, and so I gave him a chance. And mostly, he is quite reasonable—he’s in a position of giving advice, so he must by necessity prescribe do’s and don’ts (and yes, that’s the correct use of apostrophes in “do’s and don’ts”; we all hate it, too), but he also really knows his stuff, and is pretty up-front about when his peeves are his own peeves that he has developed through the application of logic, which is a thing with a pretty limited role in language. While he wears the curmudgeonly thing as a persona, the book is situated firmly in the “make them remember it by making it funny” school of teaching, rather than the regular boring elitism that so unfortunately plagues much grammar and usage “advice.”
Walsh is a newspaper copy chief, so while his advice runs to “newspaper style” in some ways that are not always applicable to everything, his main goal seems to be making things as readable as possible, rather than, say, showing off how articulate you are (which is, sadly, the goal of a lot of other self-described prescriptivists). And this book has a lot of really solid advice on how to do that, including areas where he advises throwing out or working around certain aspects of “technical correctness” to get more natural-sounding sentences (what one of my creative writing teachers called “invisible writing”). And it doesn’t spend a lot of time rehashing the basics—it’s pretty much all about the “elephants in the room” of writing; the bits people actually get confused about or about which there’s no consensus. He’s also got some useful, if scathing, advice about the “flair, panache” definition of style, like a list of the most tired tropes to use in an introduction.
Overall, it’s very silly, but solid as an elephant.
Walsh is a newspaper copy chief, so while his advice runs to “newspaper style” in some ways that are not always applicable to everything, his main goal seems to be making things as readable as possible, rather than, say, showing off how articulate you are (which is, sadly, the goal of a lot of other self-described prescriptivists). And this book has a lot of really solid advice on how to do that, including areas where he advises throwing out or working around certain aspects of “technical correctness” to get more natural-sounding sentences (what one of my creative writing teachers called “invisible writing”). And it doesn’t spend a lot of time rehashing the basics—it’s pretty much all about the “elephants in the room” of writing; the bits people actually get confused about or about which there’s no consensus. He’s also got some useful, if scathing, advice about the “flair, panache” definition of style, like a list of the most tired tropes to use in an introduction.
Overall, it’s very silly, but solid as an elephant.