When it comes to grammar, I believe that “style” is a better term than “rules”. There is no universal rule book for writing, and just like any kind of art, styles and language change over time. Dictionaries are always being updated, although the process is much slower than the evolution of language. A linguist will tell you the difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivists judge grammar to be either correct or incorrect, while descriptivists believe that if a word or phrase is used by many people, it’s correct. A prescriptivist might seem like a pedant, dwelling on archaic grammar rules for the sake of rules, but prescriptivism can be useful in certain circumstances, for instance, when learning a new language.
William Strunk Jr., an English professor at Cornell, wrote “The Elements of Style” in 1918. One of his students, Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White, wrote the 4th edition in 1959. Although critics of the book say that the content is too prescriptive, I think it is important to know the rules that many people adhere to in order to break them intelligently.
I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time in 2023 and thought it might be useful to read “The Elements of Style” for a crash course in grammar. (I also recorded an audiobook version of the original text). Although the book is over one hundred years old and contains many archaic ideas, for instance his distaste for the use of singular “they”, I found that the book dramatically helped me clean up my writing. The section about omitting needless words, for example, not only states an extremely useful idea, it also gives examples on how to do so without leaving out vital information. The book clears up some confusing words, like lay vs lie, and affect vs effect, and although it supports some silly rules such as “don’t split an infinitive”, it doesn’t say that breaking these rules is wrong, but merely inadvisable. The fourth edition is more lenient, saying that “Some infinitives seem to improve on being split…”.
The ebook version of “The Elements of Style, 1st ed.” is in the public domain and easy to access with a quick google search. In my audiobook version, I read out punctuation in example sentences, and changed some phrases such as “in the left hand column” to “in the first examples”, in order to make it audio friendly, but otherwise kept the content true to the original 1918 text. It’s available on Chirp, Spotify, Hoopla and other audiobook platforms.
Thanks for reading!
Rebecca H. Lee
Audiobook Narrator
Listen to this blog post here: https://youtu.be/GTQqxkXty_c
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