Mark Garvey's "Stylized': Admiration or adoration?

In 20 years of formal education, I was never assigned Strunk and White's Elements of Style as a text, but I grew up in a house where it was always within reach. I read this classic numerous times during my teens, completely internalizing many of its prescriptions and proscriptions for writers. Since I now work as an editor and writer, I'm often in a position to externalize them as well.

So when I noticed Mark Garvey's Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style in the library, I picked it up, notwithstanding the error in the subtitle. (After a possessive, Strunk and White— and I— prefer to remove the "The" of a title.)

Garvey fleshes out the story of how E.B. White, William Strunk's student at Cornell-turned-New Yorker essayist, re-encountered Strunk's "little" textbook and came to edit it and add a chapter on writing and style. Garvey's account, unfortunately, focuses primarily on what draft was completed when, rather than examining the specifics of the changes, which might have illuminated the posthumous collaboration between the two men.

"'Stupid grammar advice'

Garvey also looks at the book's admirers and detractors. He includes long excerpts of interviews with several well-known writers about their take on Elements. Perhaps an aspiring writer would find these of interest. I did not.

Garvey's gestures toward a critical view are, not unexpectedly, halfhearted. He mentions Geoffrey Pullum's "50 years of stupid grammar advice," in the Chronicle of Higher Education last year, but he dismisses Pullum as a grouser, correctly pointing out that Pullum's well-written prose reflects Strunk and White's stylistic guidelines.

Garvey misses the point, though: Pullum's beef is with Strunk and White's grammar rules. Pullum points out, for example, that the book's advice to eschew the passive voice includes four examples, only one of which is actually in the passive voice.

"The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip," Pullum writes. "It is typical of Elements. The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar."

It's a point worth addressing, but Garvey chooses not to. Instead, he defends Elements against those who, he argues, threw the baby of clear prose out with the bathwater of Dead White Male hegemony.

What's the problem?

The more inclusive, less prescriptivist understanding of literature has, Garvey argues, led teachers to reject the elements not only of style but of clear thinking and clear communication as well. Yet Garvey doesn't really provide any evidence of this rejection, leaving me uncertain whether he's addressing an actual criticism of Elements or a hypothetical one.

Between its tedious history, its maundering authorial interviews, and its straw-man defenses against criticism, Garvey's little book comes in at 208 pages— well over twice the length of the book it honors. It did, however, succeed in inspiring me to dig out Elements for the first time in 40 years.

I had not remembered how very basic— and (pace Pullum) utterly unexceptionable— much of it is: rules about subject-verb agreement and the like.

He or she, or both?

In Chapter 3 ("A Few Matters of Form"), Strunk and White segue from the rules of grammar into their opinions about usage, not all of them useful. In the 1979 edition, the last one White edited, he continued to fight a rear-guard action against the "misuse" of hopefully— a usage with which I, prescriptivist to my fingertips, have made my peace.

The recommendation that "he" be used to refer to a person of unknown gender— which White still defended in 1979— was finally modified in the 1999 edition, the first after White's death in 1985. (This edition, by the way, was prepared by an unnamed committee, a peculiar fate for a book so firmly associated with the strong authorial voices of Strunk and White.)

Illustrations, yet

Elements is worth rereading in any edition (with the possible exception of the 2007 illustrated edition; this is not a book that benefits from illustrations, though those who don't share my aversion to whimsy may be charmed). Anyone who needs to string words together will benefit from both its outline of grammar and White's thoughts on style.

Having read (or reread) Elements, though, what next? For more lovely prose, you could, as I did, seek out White's essays. If you want detailed advice about writing, I recommend Anne Lamott's 1995 work, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Stylized, though, is recommended only to those who, like Garvey, fetishize The Elements of Style.♦


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