Category: Teaching

Talk about a little story that has legs: on NPR’s “Morning Edition” yesterday (I actually started writing this post while listening to this show yesterday morning; it’s been one thing or another the last couple of days), there was a fairly long piece about the recently published illustrated version of The Elements of Style. Besides talking about the book and its illustrations, the story also talked about the “opera” (but not really so much an opera as a song cycle) that has words based on the book. They have a web site that includes samples of two songs, the story from earlier, and a few pictures from the book.

By the way, the music, IMO, is what Laurie Anderson once referred to in a piece of hers as “Difficult Listening Music.” But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I don’t want to make too much out of this, and I do think that the Maria Kalman illustrations are hilarious and charming. But I guess I have two problems with the way that these reports talk about The Elements of Style. First, while there is a lot of useful advice in Strunk’s and White’s little book, there’s quite a bit wrong with it, too. The book doesn’t so much offer instruction as it offers Strunk’s (and, I am sure, White’s) “pet peeves” about grammar and useage. Strunk’s and White’s advice– “Be clear,” “Omit needless words,” “Do not affect a breezy manner,” etc.– are merely affirmations. They are to writing instruction what Dr. Phil is to psychotherapy.

And beyond that, Strunk’s and White’s editions of the book are elitist and down-right sexist. I say “Strunk’s and White’s editions” because the latest edition of the book and the edition that Kalman illustrated was published in 2000, about 15 years after White’s death and at least 45 years since Strunk’s demise. This is significant because there are some interesting differences between the 2000 edition and the 1979 edition: many of the examples have been changed to make the book at least a bit more inclusive, they actually mention computers (not significantly, but more than they did in 1979, of course), and they eliminate White’s rather defensive prose on the use of “he” for the generic pronoun. In fact, one of the examples that Kalman illustrates– something like “Chlöe smells good, like a pretty baby should” (Kalman has a picture of a big and pretty baby)– was originally “Chlöe smells good, like a pretty girl should,” which obviously has different connotations. There are dozens of examples like this. I suppose we can credit Strunk’s and White’s assumptions to the fact that the book is a “product of a different time,” but we shouldn’t gloss over Strunk’s and White’s view of the world with a revision that “corrects” them.

The second issue is more significant and more difficult to do anything about, the concept “out there” about what counts as “writing.” Just about every English professor or teacher in the universe has been in the situation where they meet a stranger (on a plane, at a party, waiting in a line, whatever) and after they tell the stranger that they are an English professor or teacher, the stranger says something like “Oh, I better watch my grammar.” And when I tell people outside of English studies (and sometimes inside, too!) that I do things in my classes like make web sites, study email exchanges, examine the balance between text and graphics, etc., etc., they get a bit confused.

I was reading Kathy Yancey’s CCCC 2003 keynote essay the other day (I think it was the 2003 keynote; it was published in the December 2004 issue of the CCCs) and I think she makes a pretty good argument about where we ought to be going with writing. One quote that sort of sums it up for me:

This new composition includes rhetoric and is about literacy. New composition includes the literacy of print: it adds on to it and brings the notions of practice and activity and circulation and media and screen and networking to our conceptions of process. It will require a new expertise of us as it does of our students. And ultimately, new composition may require a new site for learning for all of us.

Right on; now, the question is how do we convince people outside of our own narrow little world that this ought to be what they think of “writing?” And how do we get a story about this new concept of writing in the New York Times or on NPR?

Via a New York Times article called “Style Gets New Elements,” I discovered this morning that Penguin Press has come out with a version of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style which (or is it that? perhaps I should look that up) includes illustrations by the artist Maria Kalman.

What did she illustrate, you ask? As the article reports:

In the new clothbound edition, Ms. Kalman’s whimsical paintings are sprinkled through the text, often responding to the wry or quirky examples the authors chose to enliven what might otherwise have been a dry discussion of grammatical rules. On the topic of pronoun cases, they offer: “Polly loves cake more than she loves me.” On the uses of the dash: “His first thought on getting out of bed – if he had any thought at all – was to get back in again.” Ms. Kalman had no shortage of material.

I routinely teach The Elements of Style in an advanced writing class I teach called “Writing, Style, and Technology.” I won’t belabor it now, but my goal in teaching the book is to problematize it because, while I think Strunk and White offer a lot of good advice, I also think they offer a fair amount of bad or just plain “wrong” advice, too. And, along the way, they have a lot of kind of strange examples– thus the illustrations, which are a hoot.

The illustrations aren’t designed to explain the rules at all; rather, they are pieces of art that take their inspiration from the rules themselves. The result is some very funny and charming pictures, and I think it has this effect on the original that I can’t quite put my finger on yet. But basically, I think the illustrations change the book from being a bunch of pretty static and straight-forward rules into a kind of strange and surrealist “art” piece.

But wait– there’s more. According to The NYT:

…the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought “Elements of Style” song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight at 8 in a highly unusual, if oddly appropriate, concert setting: the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library.

Oh, and at the end of the article, they quote a letter White wrote in 1981 that mentions a ballet based on The Elements of Style.

At some point in the (hopefully) near future, I think I’d like to/need to write some sort of review or article about this thing. I don’t know who would publish it, but….