Basics of writing and grammar

That's not a good place to start if you're a beginner, but it wouldn't hurt picking it up and reading as you progress. I've got entire passages of it memorized, and I would say it definitely doesn't hold your hand. A lot of it assumes you have knowledge on concepts and terminology.

>but it's outdated
It's not. It's gone through plenty of revisions and updated for the times.

>not that anyone born after 1940 knows how to use a semi-colon properly or needs to

Explain this. I use a shit load in every paper. Most undergraduate friends of mine know how to properly use them, and the ones that don't still understand them.

>unsophisticated works
Be careful there.

not who you're responding to but I used a lot of semicolons in college and now I just find them awful. The colon is decent at times and I use semicolons when listing (rarely, very rarely) but try to avoid them. Full stops and commas are the most effective and sometimes if I cant use either as I'd like I'll use '- - ' (Nietzsche uses those a lot in place of alot of different punctuation and stops and I think it makes a sentence read like it's manic and hopping around sweating.) The semicolon is just an indicator that you made good grades in highschool English or passed English comp 1 & 2 in college. It's the Bob Marley tapestry of grammar

>I use semicolons when listing

Stopped reading right there. You don't even understand the use of the semicolon.

Seriously, if you think it's just "an indicator you made good grades in highschool English" then you're just an awful writer and you're saying this to compensate for your lack of knowledge on basic mechanics.

Pick up any book of value and look to see them in use.

Im at University and want to seriously improve my writing quality, is it really worth it?

The semi-colon is not necessary in day to day usage. It is, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, more a linguistic status symbol than a necessary element of basic grammar.

Semi-colons are absolutely warranted when listing a series composed of phrases rather than singular words.

bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/page_05.htm

Strunk and White is pure trash for schoolmarms and plebians. They didn't even know what the passive voice is. They constantly identified non-passive constructions as passive.

>Stopped reading right there. You don't even understand the use of the semicolon.
Holy shit the misplaced arrogance in this post.

This.

Strunk and White ignore centuries of English language writing. Don't waste your time with this trash, OP.

Yes, just give it a shot and see how it works for you

This book is actually detrimental

Since some of these rules change yearly for the sake of books sales, I'd say you were better off doing two things: Read good books, and develop your own ideas for what makes sense in your writing structure.

>some of these rules change
It's useless since different publishers/magazines etc have their own style guides or style sheets that you have to follow for the sake of consistency. So you have to be flexible to write, Strunkand White is meaningless. You get better instruction in Roget's Thesaurus 2bh

it is outdated and it was never good.
>don't use passive voice
>don't use negatives
>don't use adjectives or adverbs
>don't split infinitives
are you kidding me

what are some good resources for tacospeak?

I want to read the RAE grammar book, but is like 1.5k pages.

you know ive always wondered

why do they call it strunk & white instead of skunk & white ?

Posts like these are proof positive that reading any style guide is pointless if you lack basic reading comprehension.

>They constantly identified non-passive constructions as passive.
Give one example and I'll show you why you're wrong.

They literally do not say any of these things. For example, they never say "don't use adjectives or adverbs"; they do say "Write with nouns and verbs." Here's the full quote, minus their example of adjectives doing work that their nouns couldn't do alone:

>Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. This is not to disparage adjectives and adverbs; they are indispensable parts of speech. ... however, it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.

TEOS is a style guide, not a grammar textbook. It will help you get into the habit of writing strong, clear language. If you're not into that, by all means keep posting your purple bullshit to critique threads on Veeky Forums, but don't say Strunk and White is shit because you don't know how to read or think.

Also, for you to interpret their advice to put statements in positive form as "don't use negatives" is fucking funny. The irony...

Good question.

Any grammar books (idioma español books) for the 6 years of spic elementary school, I'd assume. That's how we learn it.

>Give one example and I'll show you why you're wrong.
chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497
There are three at
>What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't.

I ask because I'm a spic.

Well, again, your educación primaria idioma español books.

Finished Pinker's Sense of Style not too long ago. If not anything, it'll save you the monotony of Strunk and White and make you more conscientious of mechanical conventions. Though desu his thesis can be boiled down to some rustic advice, some cognitive psych anecdotes, and his preferences (in good taste) culminating in "Don't be a pretentious dumbfuck."

>"Don't be a pretentious dumbfuck."
I runic for Pinker. But I might pick it up now, thanks user.

>I runic
My autocorrect no longer recognises ironic

Angry reddit guy, I'm still waiting for a reply.

the three sentences provided are not listed in the book as passive. although i could guide your reading comprehension here (if you have even read the book yourself), the error is so fundamental that any advice would have to be a dumb platitude

DUMB PLATITUDE, incidentally, being another criticism leveled by this article. this is the problem with interpreting qualified, positive statements as "don't do X": the proscription is either always correct, in which case it is a platitude, or it is not always correct, in which case it is completely wrong. it's intuitive why this is a dumb way to approach style.
see the latter part of
to relate this to OP: yes, the book is definitely a good starting-off point. a lot of its critics misunderstand its purpose, almost intentionally, it seems. the book - practically a short pamphlet and written originally for all of strunk's students, including the illiterate ones - is fucking basic. it was not written with eng professors or Beckett in mind. consider it the equivalent of a painter's book on anatomy, and leave cubism for when you know how to sketch a face or fucking elbow correctly

Well, there's your problem. You're taking the opinion of some other guy who failed at reading comprehension and adopting it as your own.

The writer of that article says "'There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground' has no sign of the passive in it anywhere." Well, no shit. The book doesn't say "Here are some examples of passive voice and how to convert them to active voice." Again, TEOS isn't a grammar textbook. What the book DOES say is:
>Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expressions as "there is" or "could be heard."

So, they call it perfunctory. They imply that it's shit and show you how to easily change it to not-shit. But nowhere do they say that it's an example of a passive construction.

I haven't read this Pullum guy's whole article, but it sounds like he is missing the distinction between style guide and textbook as well. Parsing S&W's sentences and tearing them down for violating their own "rules"? Reeks of pretentious contrarianism. I think he missed where S&W say "the ear must be quicker than the handbook." The goal is clarity and readability, not smugness and condescension.

And also what this based user said.

I always wondered why my 9th grade English teacher told us not to use passive voice. Thanks Strunk & White.

I've never fully read S&W (I went through the whole editorial writing thing in college and found that they were misrepresenting the fundamentals of writing). What I am finding quite interesting tho is how you claim clarity yet the work seems to be immensely confusing for a number of people.

>I've never fully read S&W
My edition (4th) is 105 pages including the glossary and index.

>(I went through the whole editorial writing thing in college and found that they were misrepresenting the fundamentals of writing)
An antecedent for the pronoun "they" would be helpful here. Are you talking about S&W or faculty at your college? What does "misrepresenting the fundamentals of writing" mean, and why should I place any credence in your opinions on said fundamentals when you demonstrated in your first sentence a weak grasp of one of them? Reading S&W pp. 28-30 should help you avoid those sorts of instances of ambiguity in the future.

>What I am finding quite interesting tho is how you claim clarity yet the work seems to be immensely confusing for a number of people.
I can only guess that by "the work" you mean The Elements of Style, yet no one in this thread claimed to be confused by it. A few claimed to be somehow above the advice in the book while simultaneously implicating themselves in having never actually read it. By the way, thanks for copping to having not read it unlike the other fuckin giamopes in here.

I ain't even trying to be a dick, but there are a lot of black ass pots in this thread.

>An antecedent for the pronoun "they" would be helpful here. Are you talking about S&W or faculty at your college?
No it wouldn't but if you want to believe that w/e. Forgetting that you've had to introduce this unmentioned faculty into the mix to get some """ambiguity""", and forgetting S&W rules: think which one makes sense. Like which interpretation has some meaning.

>What does "misrepresenting the fundamentals of writing" mean
Gee whizz I'm glad you asked. For the passive voice shit to use an example, iirc they say it isn't bold. The passive voice is plenty bold, it is profound even. That's often how it gets used in rhetoric. "250 were killed" is more hard hitting than "It killed 250 people". Another example:
> The content of their character, not the color of their skin, will judge my 4 little children.
Screw it, they were right all along. That's much bolder!

The real thing going on under all this is separation of topic and comment. Because of how passive voice rearranges the order of a sentence it can also sometimes stick the wrong thing in the wrong place. Let's take one of their examples of naughty passive voice:
> My first visit to Boston will always be remembered.
This is a far far better formulation than
> I will always remember my first visit to Boston.
If I'm writing about visits and memory and not myself and Boston. If I'm writing about visiting my Bostonian aunt with dementia the first one is fucking gold ffs. It's bolder in that case because I present what's important in the right places, no faffing around to try and please a couple of idiots.

>"250 were killed" is more hard hitting than "It killed 250 people".
Hard hitting? I mean, it depends on the context. Sure, a news article will say "250 were killed" if they don't know exactly who killed them or to respect the dead by making them the subject of the sentence instead of their killer. You see passive constructions in mainstream media all the time. There is nothing inherently "profound" about the passive voice, but of course it has its applications, and no one says it doesn't:

>This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

You disagreeing with their Boston visit example? No. Just no. Saying "My ... will always be remembered" when you mean "I will always remember..." is fucking terrible. At least I think you're disagreeing, but tbqh your writing is unclear as fuck, and I can see why.

Second for On Writing Well

>Grammar by Diagram by Cindy Vitto
where I can find it?

Haven't seen it in any brick and mortar stores, but you can find it on amazon. I'd check ebay or half.com or abesbooks too, because it is a college textbook and is pricey. Get the workbook too. Beware of buying used though, because the book is designed to be written in, so make sure you aren't getting one some pleb filled up with pen.

>Le semicolon is pretentious meme

It serves a particular function.

>Full stops and commas are the most effective and sometimes if I cant use either as I'd like I'll use '- - '

Commas and semicolons aren't [directly] interchangeable; sometimes you might not want to use a conjunction. Dashes are only interchangeable with commas—especially for parenthesis—and colons.

The semicolon has a poor reputation, partly due to prolific misuse, but also because it's seen as half of something; it's not quite a full stop but more than a comma.

I hesitate to confine it merely to 'stylistic' function for obvious reasons concerning the vagueries of style, however, its functionality does lend itself to such use. You might argue that it links two independent clauses with more intimacy than any other grammatical device for example, and that it does so with a subtlety not achievable by a dash, and a firmness not achievable by a comma and conjunction.

>by making them the subject of the sentence instead of their killer.
That's not passive voice. If you think it magics the object into the subject you're merely illustrating how shittily this book illustrates wtf it's even talking about.
>At least I think you're disagreeing
You know I'm disagreeing, but you drank too much S&W koolaid that you're convincing yourself something in this Bible of yours is true when it's a pile of neurotic lies. If you construct a sentence clearly on sound rhetoric people can parse it just fine. Because people understand rhetoric and they read the meaning.

Is this sacrilege btw?
>Daesh are not Isis. They are not a state. They are imperialists posing as revolutionaries. And not only are they a threat to freedom in the Middle East and further afield, they are by far one of the biggest threats to the Islamic ways of life in the region.

Not bad for something I just shat out. Bit of polishing needed. But you'd want to totally rewrite that I'm guessing. If you do, go ahead and do it.

I think the thing with the semicolon; many people realised in their early teens it could remove an almost arbitrary word and better maintain this "introduce an idea; talk about it" format we often like to think in. So it got way way overused.

Now I'm older and I want to have more the veneer of hard hitting masculinity wherever I can, now if anything gets used it's a colon. I p much only use a semi for listing. It's fucking magic for that tho.

strunk and white are giving grammatical advice in their book. the authors' aim was to provide a convenient source for "the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated." it is still used as such in many classrooms all over the english-speaking world, from middle school english classes to graduate seminars.

strunk and white clearly advocate avoiding the use of adverbs and adjectives. they seem to think that you should be able to find a specific noun or verb that makes adjectives/adverbs unnecessary. who knows where they got that idea; they certainly didn't do any kind of formal corpus work.

>you put their advice about POSITIVES in negative form, lol
you'll notice that ALL the points I listed are in negative form.
strunk and white are pretty clear on this point as well: according to them, the word "not" is bad. they say the word is inherently weak, and that "as a rule it is better to express a negative in positive form."

they also say
>"use the active voice" which is "more direct and vigorous than the passive"
that indicates that the passive should be avoided. of course, you'd have to be an idiot to think that you could get away with NEVER using passives, and strunk and white do admit that it is sometimes necessary. however, the examples they give for acceptable uses of the passive aren't actually passives.
>"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground"
not a passive
>"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had"
not a passive
>"The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired"
not a passive. "became impaired" is not a passive.

here are some other interesting points of bad advice they have
>"nearby" is not a "fully accepted" word
though they are kind enough to accept it though "analogy of of close by and hard by," in reality it has been a word since the 15th century at the latest.
>"kind of" is not a substitute for "rather" (that means phrases like "kind of annoying" are bad).
they give no justification for this. a simple corpus search reveals their position to be false.
>"however" when it means "nevertheless" should not come at the beginning of a sentence.
again, no justification given.
>"they" should never be used as a 3rd person singular pronoun.
this point would rule out a sentence like "everyone thinks they're a genius" in favor of "everyone thinks he's a genius." again, obviously they have no justification for this whatsoever, even though a simple corpus study would reveal "they" to be MORE appropriate in this case and countless others.
>"The use of worth while before a noun ("a worth while story") is indefensible."
a simple corpus search reveals this position to be indefensible.
>"Write to-day, to-night, to-morrow (but not together) with hyphen"
times change I guess.

>times change I guess.
Hyphenation certainly does change (so wrist watch became wrist-watch and is now firmly established and wristwatch), but it's a 1920s book isn't it? So if to-day isn't an archaism it's hypercorrection. I strongly suspect hypercorrection.

I've just had a look at Chaucer since I thought it would have something unhyphenated, but it's written to-morwe so possible archaism still stands.

>That's not passive voice. If you think it magics the object into the subject you're merely illustrating how shittily this book illustrates wtf it's even talking about.

Hold the fucking phone. Are you saying that in the sentence "250 people were killed" that "people" are the subject of the sentence? That's what it sounds like you are saying. Do you not understand the distinction between a subject and an agent in a sentence? I think you need to bow out gracefully right now and go make sure you know what you're talking about before you embarrass yourself in real life.

Okay, first of all, you're saying S&W uses those sentences as examples of passive constructions. No, they don't, and we've already gone over that. See and . Read the thread before jumping in.

I'm not going to address all those points in the latter half of your post, because it looks like you must have taken them from an old edition. For example, in my edition, S&W say:
>The adjective "worthwhile" (one word) is acceptable but emaciated. Use a stronger word.
Sounds like solid advice to me. But yeah, the use of worth while (two words) before a noun IS indefensible. Anyway, as far as the to-day thing, times do change, and editions are updated to reflect it. Catch up.

Aw fuck. Meant to type "Are you saying that in the sentence "250 people were killed" that "people" are ***NOT*** the subject of the sentence?" ...the point being, yes, in the sentence "250 people were killed," PEOPLE = subject.

>Are you saying that in the sentence "250 people were killed" that "people" are the subject of the sentence?
No passive voice goes beyond switching subject and object, and as in that example you need not mention an agent (if indeed there can be said to be one). There's also an effect of action being more closely tied to the theme (which I can see you are blind to).

Well done on ignoring the rest of the post tho

>that "people" are ***NOT*** the subject of the sentence
Is*
Are that a Strunken White rule?

>Is pic related the best place to start?
Stay away from it.

>It's not. It's gone through plenty of revisions and updated for the times.
Translation: It's a patchwork.

chronicle com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497

>After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.

>This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less.

Please note that I don't quote the quotations. My head hurt. Won't share the pain.

Anyone use John Gardner's The Art of Fiction? I've heard good things of it

I'll address the rest of your post once I confirm this isn't bait and, if it's not, once I can figure out what you're talking about.

Let's make this simple while sticking with people being killed.
>He killed people.
"He" is the subject. This is active voice, because the subject is performing the action of the verb.
>People were killed.
"People" is the subject. This is passive voice, because the subject is being acted upon. The agent is omitted, which is fine, but it would obviously be whomever/whatever did the killing.

Forget "effect of action being more closely tied to theme." I guess I am blind to that, because that makes no sense to me. Do you agree with all that?

He's quite level headed and pragmatic. I'm sure he wrote some stuff on finding focus and generating ideas but I might be mixing him up with someone else. As far as those sorts of books go tho, he's good.

Nice job, man. Take those quotation marks away, and I could have a case for using the plural verb. But props for being clever there, because I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone with all the dumb shit I've been reading.

>Let's make this simple
It's not simple. Or at least not simple enough for you.

I'll give you an example: content clauses in passive voice.
> I know you find passive voice confusing
Becomes
>you are known to find passive voice confusing

Your understanding was probs
> that I find passive voice confusing was known
Which is passable if clumsy.

I think 2bh it's going to be a bit much explaining why S&W is shit if it's this much effort to engage you. And I don't totally blame you for that, some blame lies with Sod and Wank for sure.

>Take those quotation marks away, and I could have a case for using the plural verb.
No. No you really wouldn't.

People who cannot into metalinguistics thinking they can give fucking advice about writing... grumble grumble

Alright, you almost had me thinking this wasn't bait, but you made it too obvious. 9/10

Metalinguistics now? Okay. Good game, guys. Excuse me. I've been inspired to make a donation to the ASDF. Peace.

the sentences may not be introduced with the sentence "the following are passive sentences," but they are listed in a section called "use the active voice," are immediately preceded by a paragraph explaining why it is usually bad to use passives, and are immediately followed by another paragraph about passives. I would find it hard to justify an interpretation of those examples in which they are not presumed to be passives. If you're right, and they are not supposed to represent passives, then it's just bad writing by the authors.

>the use of worth while (two words) before a noun is indefensible
there is no difference between "worth while" (two words) and "worthwhile" (one word). the use of "worthwhile" (either form) is perfectly defensible before nouns, seeing as that construction accounts for at least 10% of the word's (quite frequent) usage.

as for the rest of the issues that you failed to address, the point is that TES advocates a perfectly arbitrary set of guidelines for english style, many of which are blatantly bad advice, such as the ones I pointed out. they were bad advice when they were in the current edition, and they're bad advice now. just because they've been edited out doesn't make them bad advice or make TES any more useful.

>In the sentence "250 people were killed," "250 people" is NOT the subject.
actually, it is, by any and every diagnostic you can come up with. the basic syntactic description of the passive is that it maps the object of the active to the subject of the passive, without changing the thematic roles involved. for instance, in a sentence like "the boy kissed the girl," "the boy" is the subject, and "the girl" is the object. the corresponding passive is "the girl was kissed by the boy," with "the girl" as the subject. in both cases, the thematic roles are the same: "the boy" is the agent and "the girl" is the patient. you can tell which element is the subject using a number of diagnostics.
>agreement
in english, the verb agrees with the subject of the sentence in number. watch the agreement on the verb in these sentences as the noun phrase arguments' number is changed.
"the girl was kissed by the boy"
"the girl was kissed by the boys"
"the girls were kissed by the boy"
"the girls were kissed by the boys"
the verb agrees in number with "the girl(s)," not "the boy(s)". this is evidence that "the girl" is the subject.
>pro-form replacement
in english, noun phrases can be replaced by pronouns. though regular nouns do not have grammatical case reflecting grammatical roles (i.e. subject, object) pronouns do. observe the grammatical case on the substituted pronouns.
"the girl was kissed by the boy"
"she was kissed by him"
the pronoun with nominative (indicative of subject) case is "she," which corresponds to "the girl." "him" has accusative case, indicative of object.

there are a lot of other tests you could do, such as looking at subject-auxiliary inversion, extraction islands, etc.