The CliffsNotes version
cliffsnotes
I suppose it's foolish to expect good advice from CliffsNotes, a series
that isn't willing to supply the appropriate apostrophe in its own name
-- there was a real Cliff, founder Cliff Hillegass (1918-2001) -- but
on stranded prepositions CliffsQuickReview (an antipathy to apostrophes
and spacing between words seems to be widespread in this division of
Wiley Publishing)
Writing: Grammar,
Usage, and Style (by Jean Eggenshwiler & Emily Dotson
Briggs, 2001) achieves a stunning amalgam of inaccuracy and
unhelpfulness. Not to mention poor writing.
The advice, in toto (p. 51):
Ending a sentence with a preposition
can cause problems. The rule that a sentence should never end
with a preposition is no longer strictly enforced. Still, many
writers avoid ending sentences with prepositions, which is generally a
good idea. But use your own judgment. If you feel ending
with a preposition makes a particular sentence more natural, do so and
don't worry about it.
Ok, five sentences, four of them with some variant of "end (a sentence)
with a preposition" in them. I'm sorry, that's just too many
repetitions. It's like ringing a damn bell again and again.
But even that amount of repetition isn't enough to smooth the
transition from the first sentence to the second. Then there's
the
which clause in the third
sentence: is it generally a good idea, in the writers' view, to end
sentences with prepositions, or to avoid ending sentences with
prepositions? Clearly, they intend the latter interpretation, but
as it stands the sentence is an example of the sort of
indefinite-antecedent
which
they warn about elsewhere in the manual.
So much for the form of the advice. The content is even
worse.
Sentence one: I know of no evidence that stranding prepositions causes
"problems" in anybody's writing; I've seen no examples where stranding
a preposition has produced difficulties in interpretation, and I'll bet
Eggenschwiler & Biggs have no such examples from real life.
(Of course, you can invent examples with ungrammatical strandings in
them, but if people aren't inclined to strand in these situations they
don't need advice on where to put their prepositions.) In real
life, awkward or even ungrammatical
FRONTINGS do occur,
though, as an unfortunate consequence of
Dryden's
Rule, to which I now turn. Ok, but not before I give an
example of a really bad fronting, from LaTeX documentation (thanks to
Geoff Pullum, who sent me this gem on 28 August 2002):
The graphics backend driver now knows
with what you are TeXing the document, so it can go out and look for
the file with an admissible extension...
Sentence two states Dryden's Rule (in a common, but inadequate,
formulation) and presupposes that it used to be "strictly enforced",
whatever that means. This is just false. English, whether
spoken or written, has never obeyed Dryden's Rule. There has been
no lowering of standards, no falling away from some golden age of order
and regulation in the world of prepositions.
Sentence three maintains that "many writers avoid ending sentences with
prepositions", a claim that is probably also false. I doubt that
the number of non-stranding writers is very high, and I'm sure they
don't consistently avoid stranding. Just look at actual writing.
And then we get the advice: Dryden's Rule is generally a good thing,
but you should do whatever feels right to you. This is
monumentally unhelpful. If I find that I am about to strand a
preposition in my writing, well, then, it felt natural to me, so why
should I consider rewriting my sentence so as to front the
preposition? As far as I can see, the only effect of this advice
is to mess with students' minds by inducing Preposition Anxiety.
There's enough of that going around already.
The CliffsNotes volumes are supposed to function as guides to "the
basics" (that's what Hillegass's "Note to the Reader", inside the front
cover of each book, says). They are a souped-up version of the
Classic Comics/Classics Illustrated volumes that they drove out of
business. (I have an enormous fondness for these comics.
But of course as guides to literature they were hopeless, since they
translated prose into a very different, largely visual, medium and
drastically chopped plot lines and character development to fit
everything into a 64-page format. Hmm... Now I'm trying to
imagine the Classics Illustrated version of the
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.)
Souped-up in the sense that they present themselves as both accurate
and useful. (The most that the Classics Illustrated people said
for their comics was that they might encourage kids to read the
original literature. I was once, and only once, led to an
original in this fashion: W. H. Hudson's
Green Mansions. It hadn't
occurred to me that the prose might be even more overheated than the
comic book. It was not a good date.)
I have no idea how the other CliffsQuickReview volumes measure up on
the accuracy and usefulness scales, but I have to say that, on the
basis of this one, I'm glad there's no Linguistics volume.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 21, 2005 02:09 PM