Geoffrey K. Pullum of the University of Edinburgh hates the popularity of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. He doesn’t believe the frequently recommended little book deserves it.
Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them, but that is not true of the grammar stipulations.
“Use the active voice” is a typical section head. And the section in question opens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.
We are told that the active clause “I will always remember my first trip to Boston” sounds much better than the corresponding passive “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows “by”).
For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.
Of course, many writing teachers and word lovers like the book. NPR talked to Barbara Wallraff about why she’s a fan.
“There’s a certain Zen quality to some of [the book’s rules], like, ‘Be clear,'” Wallraff tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. “There’s a lot being conveyed there in two words, in exactly how to do it. People will spend whole other books explaining [that]. Or, ‘Omit needless words.’ That’s probably the most famous dictum from this book.”
On this last point, Pullum replies, “The students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction.”
Writer Bill Stieger still likes Strunk & White, but appears to take it as a good first step. In response to a friend who wanted to write more effectively without reading actual books, he recommends Elements of Style and reading actual books.
If you haven’t the habit of reading, don’t kid yourself. You must acquire it. If you haven’t read Chekov, Melville, Baldwin, Fitzgerald, Cather, Morrison, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner and the like, you’re not just missing out on fine writing, you’re cheating yourself out on the stories and wisdom of the authors. These are pleasures.
And, for heaven’s sake, attend any play penned by Shakespeare, Chekov, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, Arthur Miller, and them Greek playwright dudes: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.