Beating up on Strunk & White

[ktinkel]

The Elements of Style, by Strunk & White, is 50 years old this month, and writer Geoffrey K. Pullum (author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) has decided to yank it off its pedestal with “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.”

Whether you care may depend on when you went to school. Strunk & White was published in 1959 (the year I graduated from high school). The guide we used there and in college was Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2nd edition). I got a copy of The Elements several years later, and do not find its advice so much wrong as simplistic and seriously less interesting than Fowler’s, which you can actually read just for the fun of it.