Fungible Convictions

I’ve mentioned Joseph Williams’ Style: Towards Clarity and Grace before—it’s the best writing guide for anyone who already fancies himself a good writer. While Williams’ book has its flaws—he apparently has no idea what a gerund is and keeps conflating it with a participle—Williams does a remarkable thing: he has it make sense that, when you’re a good enough writer, you can break every rule you learned in high school and college English.

My favorite example of this, as I was going back through the book tonight, is a quoted passage by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a passage Williams introduces with:

Having emphasized how important it is not to interrupt the flow of a sentence, we should now point out that some accomplished writers do exactly that with considerable effect.

Then quoting Geertz‘s two very long, very hacked up, yet very elegant, clear sentences, he drives home the point that interrupted writing can be beautifully written:

To argue (point out, actually, for like aerial perspective or the Pythagorean theorem, the thing once seen cannot then be unseen) that the writing of ethnography involves telling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms, and deploying tropes is commonly resisted, often fiercely, because of a confusion, endemic in the West since Plato at least, of the imagined with the imaginary, the fictional with the false, making things out and making them up. The strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described, that its very nature demands we talk about it without fuss—a spade is a spade, a rose is a rose—on pain of illusion, trumpery, and self-bewitchment, leads on to the even stranger idea that, if literalism is lost, so is fact.

Gorgeous.

My mother sent me this article on using the final comma in a list of items: The Case of the Serial Comma. I wrote back, for what it’s worth, because I think debating usage is fun and I wonder if any of you can shed light on the subject:

The article isn’t quite as thorough as it should be. It says Britons “waffle” on the usage of the final comma, but in fact the vast majority of British English writing—and continental translations of writing into English—omit the final comma. In other words, nearly all European English would leave off the last comma. And why? Because a comma used in a list, in Britain more than in America, is considered a substitute for the word and (or in exclusive lists, the word or). It would be preposterous to many Britons to write, “Study the rules for the use of the comma, the semicolon, and the colon,” because that is synonymous with writing “Study the rules for the use of the comma and the semicolon and and the colon.” Americans, on the other hand, save for newspaper article- and headline-writers (“In cook-off, chef beats eggs, rivals”), view commas largely as traffic signals, tiny signs indicating where a list begins, is divided, and ends.