Continuing with the theme that Michael Vassar mentioned in our interview, that “collective wisdom” is really wrong about a whole heck of a lot, and that we should doubt the basic sanity of the world, Robin Hanson links an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice”, that completely trashes The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, long considered the Bible of writing and grammar. Every serious writer is supposed to have it.

It opens thus:

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won’t be celebrating.

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.

The author, Geoffrey K. Pullum, is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh. The entire article is great and causes me to completely question the advice I’ve received from senior writers over the last few years. Let me skip to the last paragraph, for the conclusion:

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

How could tens of thousands of English teachers have missed all these obvious-in-retrospect arguments over the last 50 years?