Over at Ten Minutes Past Deadline, Ed Latham has done me the honor of quoting my advice on observing National Grammar Day. It seems only fair to respond in kind and examine his defense of traditional formal grammar.
In "The uses of formality" he makes a case for the traditional strictures of formal writing, even though many of them are "little more than a collection of antiquated grammar, mistakes, Latinate superstitions and quixotic innovations." They are also, he reminds us, "the English of government, the police, the corporate attorney: the voice of those who have power to command." The traditional "rules," even when they are superstitions, "a raising of the rhetorical stakes, an appropriation of the register in which the most serious matters are discussed."
In the crucial matter of adjusting register to what is apt for the reader and the occasion, "the zombie rules of the 18th and 19th century prescriptivists are almost beyond criticism. They have become embedded in the law and the classroom, and in a generation of usage manuals that have still not been superseded in the common imagination. Like so much language change, they were born out of misapprehension and error, and yet have become part of English nonetheless."
I am with Mr. Latham, up to a point. Writing and editing require judgments about what is appropriate in tone, in register, in approach, for the writer, for the subject, for the occasion, for the publication, for the audience. Formal subjects, occasions, and audiences demand formal writing. And if, as descriptivists argue, "mistakes," if sustained long enough by a large enough group, become standard in English, then a similar argument can be made for the "mistakes" of the usage manuals the schoolrooms cling to.
But it is entirely possible to write a lucid and compelling formal English without submitting to the stranded-preposition, split-infinitive shibboleths. Bryan Garner, no woolly descriptivist, has dismissed a score of them as "superstitions" and "crotchets."
It is possible that in these dispatches I have made some overstatements (being, as Boswell said of Dr. Johnson, "sometimes not a little actuated by a spirit of contradiction") and have consequently been misunderstood. Indulge me as I list some of my working principles.
Item: Formal English is an important dialect of the language, indispensable for many professional purposes, but it is not privileged above all other dialects. Keep it in its place.
Item: American English, and journalism in particular, has been growing more conversational and less formal for more than a century. "Conversational" does not mean "colloquial," but the "familiar style" of which Hazlitt wrote.
Item: English is what its users collectively make it, not what manuals decree. Decisions about grammar, usage, and register should be made on the basis of empirical evidence rather than what one was told in childhood. We should be continually investigating and learning. My goal is to function as an informed prescriptivist.
Item: As I said above, writer, subject, occasion, publication, and audience are always to be taken into account and balanced. Making judgments is always more fraught than merely following some set of arbitrary rules, but you knew the job was hazardous when you took it on.