"The Truth About English Grammar"
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It's past time for me to feature Geoff Pullum's new book, The Truth About English Grammar. The publisher's blurb:
Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader – thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other – repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents.
Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With his foundation, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation.
Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.
The start of the preface:
If you have ever been led to believe that your grammar is bad, relax a little. This book aims to liberate you, not berate you. Its main aim is to lay out some of the most basic principles of grammar from the ground up, without presupposing any previous acquaintance, and to lay out those principles in a more modern and consistent way. But it also to some extent aims to free you from fears of accidentally violating grammar and being judged for it. Far too many alleged “grammatical errors” aren’t mistakes at all: they presuppose rules that don’t exist and never did.
And the start of the final section, with the header Disrecommendations:
Now for a few remarks that are just between you, me, and the gatepost. It may upset millions, but I owe it to you to speak the truth. Some of the most famous and much-loved books on how to write are grossly misinformed on grammar and usage, not to be trusted on style, and way past their use-by dates, which are spread across the 20th century.
A flagrant case is the book commonly known as The Elements of Style. It’s actually E.B. White’s revision and expansion of a 1918 book by William Strunk called Elements of Style, which White was assigned when he was in one of Strunk’s classes at Cornell in 1919. Parts of it were four decades old when White published his version with Macmillan in 1959, and they are over a century old now, after several more editions by different publishers. Much of what it says about grammar and usage is very bad advice, and some of White’s changes and additions (which Strunk never saw) are flagrant nonsense – like when White says that stranding a preposition “sounds like murder” (4th edition, page 78). Stay away from this book.
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” (1946) is an essay, not a book, but millions of students will have seen it in a book because it was reprinted at least 118 times in 325 editions of fifty-eight college readers between 1952 and 1996 (see “The essay canon” by Lynn Bloom in College English 61.4, 1999, 401–430). Its text can be found in scores of places on the web, and hordes of English teachers have been singing its praises for three-quarters of a century. It is full of sanctimonious virtue signaling, dishonestly cherry-picked examples, and dumb advice about writing that no one follows, like that you should never use any familiar phrase, and of course that you should never use the passive (when his own essay uses the passive far more than most writing in English does). My advice: don’t even read it, but if an English teacher asks, pretend you think it’s wonderful.
John McIntyre, "It's a grand day for grammar", 9/5/2024:
In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck.
Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists.
Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time.
As the new book states explicitly, it's basically a more accessible introduction to Geoff's earlier, longer, and denser work:
The first port of call for anyone who wants to delve more seriously into this book’s modern approach to English grammar would be A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Brett Reynolds (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2022). It’s a 400-page undergraduate-level textbook that’s fully compatible with this book in its theoretical assumptions, but it goes into a lot more detail. It’s not elementary, but then if you have read this book you are not exactly a beginner anymore.
That textbook is based on a much larger and more advanced work: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al., Cambridge University Press, 2002) – the book I’ve been referring to as CGEL. It’s a large scholarly reference work (over 1,800 pages), and although it doesn’t presuppose a linguistics degree, it uses more technical concepts and vocabulary than this book, and it attempts to be complete and exhaustive. It’s intended for grammarians and designers of courses rather than for students or for the casual reader.
Kate Gladstone said,
September 8, 2024 @ 6:34 pm
I’m thrilled that there is now a book telling the truth about English grammar! May I only ask Dr. Pullen if he will consider writing a sequel, to tell the truth about English sounds and learning to read? Far too often, I have seen and heard and suffered under Reading instruction programs (not just those for children, but those for teacher trainees, and those continuing their education as teachers) which tell immense lies about the sounds of her language, how sounds work in English or any language, and specifically about how English represents sounds in writing. I mean things like teaching that “letters make sounds” (and never even mentioning that PEOPLE make sounds, that letters and their sequences came along much later to REPRESENT them). I mean thing like telling children and other learners that the vowell-sound in “tube” is a “long” version of the vowel-sound in “tub” (and punishing any child who notices, and asks about, the fact that it isn’t so). I mean things like telling kids to believe that “we say the ‘TEE-AITCH’ sound by blending the ‘TUUH’ sound with thr ‘HUUH’ sound”: when this is wrong on, so many levels that I won’t even write them all because it’s just disgusting. (Even more disgusting, of course, is the fact that anyone who knows differently will be ridiculed for noticing and saying so. How, I wonder, do linguists cope when their kids have to learn nonsense as part of being taught how to read? Mathematicians whose children were taught that there is no such number is zero, or that’s 2+2 = 5, would complain, and would gain the support of millions when they complained … do linguist complain, when their children are taught equally bad pseudo, linguistics and folk linguistics, and flat out, lies about English for technology and photo tactics? If not, why not, and if so, what happens when linguist parents care?)
Jenny Chu said,
September 8, 2024 @ 7:58 pm
@Kate – it's a real challenge! I am an amateur linguist (only ever got my undergrad degree but never stopped learning) with kids who were taught all sorts of egregious falsehoods in school – both in English and in Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, and Classical Chinese), since we live in Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, it's a mug's game to try to change the system; it's too entrenched. But it is absolutely possible to give the kids a solid supplemental education in linguistics at home that will help them understand why they are being taught all of that. It can, in a way, be an even better education for them.
Rick Rubenstein said,
September 8, 2024 @ 11:34 pm
I'm thrilled to hear about this. I dearly miss Prof. Pullum's irrepressible voice on this blog, though I can certainly understand why he might have wanted to step away from it. (Does that mean it was repressible after all?)
RfP said,
September 9, 2024 @ 12:16 am
This looks like a very interesting post, Mark!
But now that I've been alerted to Geoff Pullum's new book, I don't really have time to actually read this post.
I have now purchased The Truth About English Grammar, and as I am currently busy reading it, I'm afraid I'm going to be too engaged in that book to be able to read this post, at least for a little while.
I hope you understand.
Aardvark Cheeselog said,
September 9, 2024 @ 9:46 am
I have to push back on the mischaracterization of Politics and the English Language, which is a well-earned critique of how institutional voices use language to obfuscate instead of communicating. It was never intended as a lesson for students writing assignments: it was aimed at professional news communicators, who have yet to take any of it to heart.
Victor Mair said,
September 9, 2024 @ 9:57 am
GKP eviscerates a dim-witted reviewer of his new book. If you've been missing Geoff's abundant wit, this rejoinder gives a good dose of his medicine, especially in responding to the reviewer's being "seized with the desire to reread Kingsley Amis’s The King’s English, still the only such work that, in its droll suavity, approaches the condition of literature itself." Check it out. Classic Pullum.
Peter Grubtal said,
September 9, 2024 @ 10:24 am
Wow! It's amazing to see that demontage of George Orwell, who in many circles in the UK is considered a secular saint. Including the accusation of virtue signalling, which is a modern jibe (and a very appropriate one in many cases).
There have been doubts expressed before about some of what he said: "prose like a window pane", for example, is seen as being antithetical to the tenets of post-structuralism, or not possible or even desirable under left-wing dialectic.
That st
ill leaves more than enough of value in his writings which I don't have to go to the bookshelf for: it's at the back of my head.
DJL said,
September 9, 2024 @ 12:00 pm
Pullum witty and incisive? Shurely shome mishtake.
JOHN MCINTYRE said,
September 9, 2024 @ 4:58 pm
What Aardvark Cheeselog says about Orwell's intent is apt, but not the point here. What Pullum objects to, rightly, is the fetishization of the essay by teachers. It is the same as his objection to The Elements of Style, a mediocre manual that has been elevated in the United States to the level of sacred scripture. I've written elsewhere about the student in my editing class who was hopelessly unprepared, failing every exercise, quiz, and test. He went to some campus writing center, which gave him a copy of Strunk and White. It was like an anvil flung to a drowning man.
RfP said,
September 9, 2024 @ 6:00 pm
I had somehow also missed Linguistics: Why It Matters, also by Geoff Pullum.
I'm reading it now.
I really will get to this post at some point. I promise!