![]() ![]() ![]() Lacking the tools to analyze language, they often struggled when turning their intuitions into advice, vainly appealing to the writer’s “ear.” And they did not seem to realize that some of the advice contradicted itself: “Many a tame sentence. There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground, for instance, is not in the passive voice, nor does The cock’s crow came with dawn contain a transitive verb. ![]() They misdefined terms such as phrase, participle, and relative clause, and in steering their readers away from passive verbs and toward active transitive ones they botched their examples of both. Strunk and White, for all their intuitive feel for style, had a tenuous grasp of grammar. Steven Pinker begins a new book on writing by finding faults in old books on writing-chief among them, The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, by Steven Pinker. ![]()
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