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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

To pull something like this off convincingly, you have to write better than E. B. White, which is pretty hard to do.

  The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous 
  esteem in which it is held by American college graduates.

Ug. What a clinker. He sounds like Hector Dexter.

And he's not even saying what he means to. Undergrads like the book too; surely he's not deliberately excluding them? He should have just written:

  The Elements of Style doesn't deserve its reputation.

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He argues that Whites grammar advice is factually wrong, and uses examples from Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker to prove his point. That argument does not depend on whether Pullum himself is a better writer that White.

But FWIW I find the first sentence much more informative than the second.

I didn't say that his argument depends on it, just that it would be more convincing if he wrote well.

If he understands something important about writing that E. B. White didn't, he ought to be able to use that special insight to produce better results, much as someone who claimed to have discovered the secret of making money ought to be rich.

You're right that the first sentence is more informative. Among its other problems, it's too informative. It's like saying that pi is 3.27394 rather than 3.14.

You're right that the first sentence is more informative. Among its other problems, it's too informative. It's like saying that pi is 3.27394 rather than 3.14.

Judgement call. "Too" informative? Perhaps for people who prefer brief sentences. For god's sake, stay the hell away from Faulkner.

It's not a judgement call whether pi is closer to 3.27394 or 3.14. It's almost as certain Pullum didn't mean to exclude undergrads from his statement.

George Orwell writes at least as well as E. B. White. His "Politics and the English Language" is better writing advice than Strunk and White, and was recently submitted to HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542250

Besides the copy of the essay linked there, there are other copies on the Web, for example,

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

showing the importance of this essay. I think undergraduates (or even high school students) would be better off reading Orwell's essay when they learn to write than reading Strunk and White.

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