This week I've been taking a look at printed grammar handbooks available for free online. One of the best I've come across so far is William J. Strunk's The Elements of Style, available from Bartleby.com.

http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html

I’ve known many professors who think highly of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. This is actually an earlier version (before E.B. White got involved), but students can get the full text for free. Though definitely dated, the handbook provides basic writing information still essential for students today.

My experience teaching 306 has led me to suspect that many (if not most) recent high school graduates have never studied grammar formally at all. Clear and easy to read, this handbook could not only help them to solve problems identified in their writing, but it could also give them a highly readable introduction to terms and concepts they may never have encountered in high school. I think most undergraduates would benefit from learning to distinguish a restrictive clause from a non-restrictive clause, or being told explicitly that “a participial phrase at the beginning or end of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.”

True, Strunk is needlessly rigid in his strict adherence to technically correct grammar, but often his tendency to ridicule constructions he finds objectionable only makes his own stance more apparent to those reading his handbook. Students may find his approach to poor style histrionic, dismissive, or even insulting, but I doubt they will miss his point.

Using Strunk's 1918 handbook in place of a more recent print edition would have some drawbacks, of course. The section “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” is far more dated than other chapters. For one thing, many of the words and expressions Strunk mentions here are no longer used at all, let alone misused. (Few undergrads today would exclaim, “Most everyone loves ice cream!”)

Students would definitely notice the historical distance separating them from the writer, particularly when he goes into fusty, old grammarian mode. His abhorrence of certain innocuous words seems a bit extreme (even to me, and I can be a bit fusty from time to time myself). For example, he calls factor “a hackneyed word” and deems dependable “a needless substitute for reliable, trustworthy.” Also, with the passage of time, some usages Strunk deems unacceptable have now become standard.

To be fair to Strunk, though, even the expressions he rejects that have now become standard are often not as precise as some of the alternatives he recommends. He also points out rules that, while generally ignored, nevertheless remain true. For example, he correctly states that et cetera is “not to be used of persons,” and goes on to explain why, something I learned from my high school Latin teacher, never in an English class.