Book Review: The Sense of Style

作者：Steven Pinker
出版社：Viking Books
副标题：The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
发行时间：2014年9月30日
来源：下载的 epub 版本
Goodreads：4.05（4872 Ratings）
豆瓣：8.9（169人评价）

list all detail topics in this book(my most favorite part):

GRAMMAR

• adjectives and adverbs
• ain’t
• and, because, but, or, so, also
• between you and I
• can versus may
• dangling modifiers
• fused participles (possessives with gerunds)
• if-then
• like, as, such as
• possessive antecedents
• preposition at the end of a sentence
• predicative nominative
• sequence of tenses and other perspective shifts
• shall and will
• split infinitives
• subjunctive mood and irrealis were
• than and as
• that and which
• verbing and other neologisms
• who and whom

QUANTITY, QUALITY, AND DEGREE

• absolute and graded qualities (very unique)
• singulars and plurals (none is versus none are)
• duals and plurals (between/among and other distinctions between two and more than two)
• things and stuff (count nouns, mass nouns and ten items or less)
• masculine and feminine (nonsexist language and singular they)

DICTION

75 words you may problematic use

PUNCTUATION

• commas and other connectors (colons, semicolons, and dashes)
• apostrophes
• quotation marks

摘录：

I like to read style manuals for another reason, the one that sends botanists to the garden and chemists to the kitchen: it’s a practical application of our science. I am a psycholinguist and a cognitive scientist, and what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind? It’s all the more captivating to someone who seeks to explain these fields to a wide readership. I think about how language works so that I can best explain how language works.
But my professional acquaintance with language has led me to read the traditional manuals with a growing sense of unease. Strunk and White, for all their intuitive feel for style, had a tenuous grasp of grammar. They misdefined terms such as phrase, participle, andrelative clause, and in steering their readers away from passive verbs and toward active transitive ones they botched their examples of both. 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. 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 . . . can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice” uses the passive voice to warn against the passive voice. George Orwell, in his vaunted “Politics and the English Language,” fell into the same trap when, without irony, he derided prose in which “the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active.”
Self-contradiction aside, we now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory. A skilled writer should know what those functions are and push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naïve style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.
Style manuals that are innocent of linguistics also are crippled in dealing with the aspect of writing that evokes the most emotion: correct and incorrect usage. Many style manuals treat traditional rules of usage the way fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments: as unerring laws chiseled in sapphire for mortals to obey or risk eternal damnation. But skeptics and freethinkers who probe the history of these rules have found that they belong to an oral tradition of folklore and myth. For many reasons, manuals that are credulous about the inerrancy of the traditional rules don’t serve writers well. Although some of the rules can make prose better, many of them make it worse, and writers are better off flouting them. The rules often mash together issues of grammatical correctness, logical coherence, formal style, and standard dialect, but a skilled writer needs to keep them straight. And the orthodox stylebooks are ill equipped to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time. Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.
Yet the authors of the classic manuals wrote as if the language they grew up with were immortal, and failed to cultivate an ear for ongoing change. Strunk and White, writing in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, condemned then-new verbs likepersonalize, finalize, host, chair, and debut, and warned writers never to use fix for “repair” or claim for “declare.” Worse, they justified their peeves with cockamamie rationalizations. The verb contact, they argued, is “vague and self-important. Do not contact people; get in touch with them, look them up, phone them, find them, or meet them.” But of course the vagueness of to contact is exactly why it caught on: sometimes a writer doesn’t need to know how one person will get in touch with another, as long as he does so. Or consider this head-scratcher, concocted to explain why a writer should never use a number word with people, only with persons: “If of ‘six people’ five went away, how many people would be left? Answer: one people.” By the same logic, writers should avoid using numbers with irregular plurals such as men, children, and teeth (“If of ‘six children’ five went away . . .”).
In the last edition published in his lifetime, White did acknowledge some changes to the language, instigated by “youths” who “speak to other youths in a tongue of their own devising: they renovate the language with a wild vigor, as they would a basement apartment.” White’s condescension to these “youths” (now in their retirement years) led him to predict the passing of *nerd, psyched, ripoff, dude, geek, *and funky, all of which have become entrenched in the language.

Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press. Soon after William Caxton set up the first one in England in 1478, he lamented, “And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.” Indeed, moral panic about the decline of writing may be as old as writing itself:

The cartoon is not much of an exaggeration. According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.
My discomfort with the classic style manuals has convinced me that we need a writing guide for the twenty-first century. It’s not that I have the desire, to say nothing of the ability, to supplant The Elements of Style. Writers can profit by reading more than one style guide, and much of Strunk and White (as it is commonly called) is as timeless as it is charming. But much of it is not. Strunk was born in 1869, and today’s writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century.
A manual for the new millennium cannot just perpetuate the diktats of earlier manuals. Today’s writers are infused by the spirit of scientific skepticism and the ethos of questioning authority. They should not be satisfied with “That’s the way it’s done” or “Because I said so,” and they deserve not to be patronized at any age. They rightly expect reasons for any advice that is foisted upon them.
Today we can provide the reasons. We have an understanding of grammatical phenomena which goes well beyond the traditional taxonomies based on crude analogies with Latin. We have a body of research on the mental dynamics of reading: the waxing and waning of memory load as readers comprehend a passage, the incrementing of their knowledge as they come to grasp its meaning, the blind alleys that can lead them astray. We have a body of history and criticism which can distinguish the rules that enhance clarity, grace, and emotional resonance from those that are based on myths and misunderstandings. By replacing dogma about usage with reason and evidence, I hope not just to avoid giving ham-fisted advice but to make the advice that I do give easier to remember than a list of dos and don’ts. Providing reasons should also allow writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, mindful of what they are designed to accomplish, rather than robotically.
“The sense of style” has a double meaning. The word sense, as in “the sense of sight” and “a sense of humor,” can refer to a faculty of mind, in this case the faculties of comprehension that resonate to a well-crafted sentence. It can also refer to “good sense” as opposed to “nonsense,” in this case the ability to discriminate between the principles that improve the quality of prose and the superstitions, fetishes, shibboleths, and initiation ordeals that have been passed down in the traditions of usage.
The Sense of Style is not a reference manualin which you can find the answer to every question about hyphenation and capitalization. Nor is it a remedial guide for badly educated students who have yet to master the mechanics of a sentence. Like the classic guides, it is designed for people who know how to write and want to write better. This includes students who hope to improve the quality of their papers, aspiring critics and journalists who want to start a blog or column or series of reviews, and professionals who seek a cure for their academese, bureaucratese, corporatese, legalese, medicalese, or officialese. The book is also written for readers who seek no help in writing but are interested in letters and literature and curious about the ways in which the sciences of mind can illuminate how language works at its best.
My focus is on nonfiction, particularly genres that put a premium on clarity and coherence. But unlike the authors of the classic guides, I don’t equate these virtues with plain words, austere expression, and formal style. You can write with clarity and with flair, too. And though the emphasis is on nonfiction, the explanations should be useful to fiction writers as well, because many principles of style apply whether the world being written about is real or imaginary. I like to think they might also be helpful to poets, orators, and other creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose to flout them for rhetorical effect.
People often ask me whether anyone today even cares about style. The English language, they say, faces a new threat in the rise of the Internet, with its texting and tweeting, its email and chatrooms. Surely the craft of written expression has declined since the days before smartphones and the Web. You remember those days, don’t you? Back in the 1980s, when teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs, bureaucrats wrote in plain English, and every academic paper was a masterpiece in the art of the essay? (Or was it the 1970s?) The problem with the Internet-is-making-us-illiterate theory, of course, is that bad prose has burdened readers in every era. Professor Strunk tried to do something about it in 1918, when young Elwyn White was a student in his English class at Cornell.
What today’s doomsayers fail to notice is that the very trends they deplore consist in oral media—radio, telephones, and television—giving way to written ones. Not so long ago it was radio and television that were said to be ruining the language. More than ever before, the currency of our social and cultural lives is the written word. And no, not all of it is the semiliterate ranting of Internet trolls. A little surfing will show that many Internet users value language that is clear, grammatical, and competently spelled and punctuated, not just in printed books and legacy media but in e-zines, blogs, Wikipedia entries, consumer reviews, and even a fair proportion of email. Surveys have shown that college students are writing more than their counterparts in earlier generations did, and that they make no more errors per page of writing. And contrary to an urban legend, they do not sprinkle their papers with smileys and instant-messaging abbreviations like IMHO and L8TR, any more than previous generations forgot how to use prepositions and articles out of the habit of omitting them from their telegrams. Members of the Internet generation, like all language users, fit their phrasing to the setting and audience, and have a good sense of what is appropriate in formal writing.
Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their messages across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous—as Strunk and White put it, “death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram.” Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste, and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land.
Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: “If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it’s, then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.” And if that isn’t enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are “huge turn-offs.” As one client said, “If you’re trying to date a woman, I don’t expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren’t you trying to put your best foot forward?”
Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures. And as we shall see in the first chapter, this thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin.

Education is an admirable thing,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” In dark moments while writing this book, I sometimes feared that Wilde might be right. When I polled some accomplished writers about which style manuals they had consulted during their apprenticeships, the most common answer I got was “none.” Writing, they said, just came naturally to them.
I’d be the last to doubt that good writers are blessed with an innate dose of fluency with syntax and memory for words. But no one is born with skills in English composition per se. Those skills may not have come from stylebooks, but they must have come from somewhere.
That somewhere is the writing of other writers. Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks, and with them a sensitivity to how they mesh and how they clash. This is the elusive “ear” of a skilled writer—the tacit sense of style which every honest stylebook, echoing Wilde, confesses cannot be explicitly taught. Biographers of great authors always try to track down the books their subjects read when they were young, because they know these sources hold the key to their development as writers.
I would not have written this book if I did not believe, contra Wilde, that many principles of style really can be taught. But the starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader. Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose. The goal of this chapter is to provide a glimpse of how that is done. I have picked four passages of twenty-first-century prose, diverse in style and content, and will think aloud as I try to understand what makes them work. My intent is not to honor these passages as if I were bestowing a prize, nor to hold them up as models for you to emulate. It’s to illustrate, via a peek into my stream of consciousness, the habit of lingering over good writing wherever you find it and reflecting on what makes it good.

The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.
The authors also share an attitude: they do not hide the passion and relish that drive them to tell us about their subjects. They write as if they have something important to say. But no, that doesn’t capture it. They write as if they have something important to show. And that, we shall see, is a key ingredient in the sense of style.

Writing is an unnatural act. As Charles Darwin observed, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” The spoken word is older than our species, and the instinct for language allows children to engage in articulate conversation years before they enter a schoolhouse. But the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond.
Speech and writing differ in their mechanics, of course, and that is one reason children must struggle with writing: it takes practice to reproduce the sounds of language with a pencil or a keyboard. But they differ in another way, which makes the acquisition of writing a lifelong challenge even after the mechanics have been mastered. Speaking and writing involve very different kinds of human relationship, and only the one associated with speech comes naturally to us. Spoken conversation is instinctive because social interaction is instinctive: we speak to those with whom we are on speaking terms. When we engage our conversational partners, we have an inkling of what they know and what they might be interested in learning, and as we chat with them, we monitor their eyes, their face, and their posture. If they need clarification, or cannot swallow an assertion, or have something to add, they can break into the conversation or follow up in turn.

A writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation. The nature of each experience shapes the way that classic prose is written. The metaphor of showing implies that there is something to see. The things in the world the writer is pointing to, then, areconcrete: people (or other animate beings) who move around in the world and interact with objects. The metaphor of conversation implies that the reader is cooperative. The writer can count on her to read between the lines, catch his drift, and connect the dots, without his having to spell out every step in his train of thought.
Classic prose, Thomas and Turner explain, is just one kind of style, whose invention they credit to seventeenth-century French writers such as Descartes and La Rochefoucauld. The differences between classic style and other styles can be appreciated by comparing their stances on the communication scenario: how the writer imagines himself to be related to the reader, and what the writer is trying to accomplish.
Classic style is not a contemplative or romantic style, in which a writer tries to share his idiosyncratic, emotional, and mostly ineffable reactions to something. Nor is it a prophetic, oracular, or oratorical style, where the writer has the gift of being able to see things that no one else can, and uses the music of language to unite an audience.
Less obviously, classic style differs from practical style, like the language of memos, manuals, term papers, and research reports. (Traditional stylebooks such as Strunk and White are mainly guides to practical style.) In practical style, the writer and reader have defined roles (supervisor and employee, teacher and student, technician and customer), and the writer’s goal is to satisfy the reader’s need. Writing in practical style may conform to a fixed template (a five-paragraph essay, a report in a scientific journal), and it is brief because the reader needs the information in a timely manner. Writing in classic style, in contrast, takes whatever form and whatever length the writer needs to present an interesting truth. The classic writer’s brevity “comes from the elegance of his mind, never from pressures of time or employment.”

Metadiscourse is not the only form of self-consciousness that bogs down professional prose. Another is a confusion of the writer’s subject matter with his line of work. Writers live in two universes. One is the world of the thing they study: the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, the development of language in children, the Taiping Rebellion in China. The other is the world of their profession: getting articles published, going to conferences, keeping up with the trends and gossip. Most of a researcher’s waking hours are spent in the second world, and it’s easy for him to confuse the two. The result is the typical opening of an academic paper:

In recent years, an increasing number of psychologists and linguists have turned their attention to the problem of child language acquisition. In this article, recent research on this process will be reviewed.

No offense, but very few people are interested in how professors spend their time. Classic style ignores the hired help and looks directly at what they are being paid to study:

All children acquire the ability to speak a language without explicit lessons. How do they accomplish this feat?

To be fair, sometimes the topic of conversation really is the activity of researchers, such as an overview intended to introduce graduate students or other insiders to the scholarly literature in their chosen profession. But researchers are apt to lose sight of whom they are writing for, and narcissistically describe the obsessions of their guild rather than what the audience really wants to know. Professional narcissism is by no means confined to academia. Journalists assigned to an issue often cover the coverage, creating the notorious media echo chamber. Museum signs explain how the shard in the showcase fits into a classification of pottery styles rather than who made it or what it was used for. Music and movie guides are dominated by data on how much money a work grossed the weekend it was released, or how many weeks it spent in the theaters or on the charts. Governments and corporations organize their Web sites around their bureaucratic structure rather than the kinds of information a user seeks.
Self-conscious writers are also apt to whinge about how what they’re about to do is so terribly difficult and complicated and controversial:

What are intractable conflicts? “Intractability” is a controversial concept, which means different things to different people.

Resilience to stress is a complex multidimensional construct. Although there is no one universally accepted definition of resilience, it is generally understood as the ability to bounce back from hardship and trauma.

The problem of language acquisition is extremely complex. It is difficult to give precise definitions of the concept of “language” and the concept of “acquisition” and the concept of “children.” There is much uncertainty about the interpretation of experimental data and a great deal of controversy surrounding the theories. More research needs to be done.

The last of these quotations is a pastiche, but the other two are real, and all are typical of the inward-looking style that makes academic writing so tedious. In classic style, the writer credits the reader with enough intelligence to realize that many concepts aren’t easy to define and that many controversies aren’t easy to resolve. She is there to see what the writer will do about it.

adjectives and adverbs. Every now and again a language grump complains that the distinction between adverbs and adjectives is disappearing from English. In fact, the distinction is alive and well, but it is governed by two subtleties that go beyond the vague memory that adverbs are words that modify verbs and end in –ly.
The first subtlety is a fact about adverbs: many of them (the ones called flat adverbs) are identical to their related adjectives. You can drive fast(adverb) or drive a fast car (adjective); hit the ball hard or hit a hard ball. The list of flat adverbs differs across dialects: real pretty(as opposed to really pretty) and The house was shaken up bad(as opposed to badly) are common in nonstandard dialects of English and have made inroads into casual and folksy speech in the standard dialect. This crossover is what gave rise to the vague impression that adverbs are endangered. But the historical trend is in the opposite direction: adverbs and adjectives are more often distinguished today than they were in the past. Standard English used to have many flat adverbs that have since been separated from their adjectival twins, such as monstrous fine (Jonathan Swift), violent hot (Daniel Defoe), and exceeding good memory (Benjamin Franklin). When today’s purists reflect on the ones that remain, like those in Drive safe, Go slow, She sure fooled me, He spelled my name wrong, and The moon is shining bright, they may hallucinate a grammatical error and promulgate prissy alternatives such as She surely fooled me and the one in this Bizarro cartoon:

The second subtlety is a fact about adjectives: they don’t just modify nouns, but can appear as complements to verbs, as in This seems excellent, We found it boring, and I feel tired. They can also show up as an adjunct to a verb phrase or clause, as in She died young and They showed up drunk. Recall from chapter 4 that grammatical categories like adjective are not the same thing as grammatical functions like modifier and complement. People who confuse the two may think that the adjectives in these sentences “modify the verb” and hence ought to be replaced by adverbs. The result is a hypercorrection like I feel terribly (which really should be I feel terrible). The related expression I feel badly may have started out in previous generations as a hypercorrected version of I feel bad. Badly has now become an adjective in its own right, meaning “sorrowful” or “regretful.” Thankfully, James Brown was never tempted to hypercorrect “I Got You (I Feel Good)” to “I Got You (I Feel Well).”

A failure to appreciate the multiple functions of adjectives also gave rise to the false accusation that Apple made a grammatical error in its slogan Think Different. The company was right not to revise it to Think Differently: the verb think can take an adjectival complement which refers to the nature of the thoughts being entertained. That is why Texans think big (not largely) and why in the musical Funny Face the advertising slogan that set off a lavish production number was Think Pink, not Think Pinkly.

ain’t. No one needs to be reminded that ain’t is frowned upon. The prohibition has been drilled into children for so long that they have made it into a jump-rope rhyme:

Don’t say ain’t or your mother will faint.
Your father will fall in a bucket of paint.
Your sister will cry; your brother will die.
Your dog will call the FBI.

I like this poetic warning of what will happen if you violate a prescriptive rule better than Dwight Macdonald’s prophecy that the bounded waters will lift their bosoms higher than the shores and make a sop of all this solid globe. But both warnings are overstatements. Despite the taint of ain’t from its origin in regional and lower-class English, and more than a century of vilification by schoolteachers, today the word is going strong. It’s not that ain’t is used as a standard contraction for negated forms of be, have, and do; no writer is that oblivious. But it does have some widely established places. One is in the lyrics of popular songs, where it is a crisp and euphonious substitute for the strident and bisyllabic isn’t, hasn’t, and doesn’t, as in “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “Ain’t She Sweet,” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” Another is in expressions that are meant to capture homespun truths, like If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, That ain’t chopped liver, and It ain’t over till it’s over. This use of ain’t may be found even in relatively formal settings to emphasize that some fact is so obvious as to be beyond further debate—as if to say, “Anyone with a lick of sense can see that.” Hilary Putnam, perhaps the most influential analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, published a famous article called “The Meaning of Meaning” in a learned academic volume. At one point he summed up his argument with “Cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!” As far as I know, his mother did not lose consciousness.

and, because, but, or, so, also. Many children are taught that it is ungrammatical to begin a sentence with a conjunction (what I have been calling a coordinator). Because they sometimes write in fragments. And are shaky about when to use periods. And when to capitalize. Teachers need a simple way to teach them how to break sentences, so they tell them that sentences beginning with and and other conjunctions are ungrammatical.
Whatever the pedagogical merits may be of feeding children misinformation, it is inappropriate for adults. There is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with a coordinator. As we saw in chapter 5, and, but, and so are among the commonest coherence markers, and they may be used to begin a sentence whenever the clauses being connected are too long or complicated to fit comfortably into a single megasentence. I’ve begun about a hundred sentences with and or but in the book so far, such as “And we all know how successful Strunk and White were in forbidding to personalize, to contact, and six people,” which capped off a series of sentences about purists who failed to change the language.
The coordinator because can also happily sit at the beginning of a sentence. Most commonly it ends up there when it introduces an explanation that has been preposed in front of a main clause, as in Because you’re mine, I walk the line. But it can also kick off a single clause when the clause serves as the answer to a why-question. The question can be explicit, as in Why can’t I have a pony? Because I said so. It can also be implicit in a series of related assertions that calls for a single explanation, which the author then provides, as in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s reflection on the twentieth-century’s genocidal tyrants:

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

between you and I. This commonly heard phrase is often held out as an excruciating grammatical blunder. I spelled out the reason in chapter 4 when discussing the example Give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back. Rigorous tree-thinking demands that a complicated phrase behave in the same way as a simpler phrase in the same position. The object of a preposition like between must be in the accusative case: we say between us or between them, not between we or between they. Therefore, according to this way of thinking, the pronouns in a coordination must also be accusative: between you and me. The phrase between you and I appears to be a hypercorrection, which arose when speakers who were corrected for Me and Amanda are going to the mall took away the crude moral that you should always say X and I, never me and X or X and me.
But the conviction that between you and I is an error needs a second look, together with the explanation that the phrase is a hypercorrection. When enough careful writers and speakers fail to do something that a theory of syntax says they should, it could mean that it’s the theory that’s wrong, not the writers.
A coordination phrase is a strange entity, and the logic of trees that applies elsewhere in English syntax does not apply to it. Most phrases have a head: a single word inside the phrase that determines its properties. The phrase the bridge to the islands has the head bridge, which is a singular noun, so we call the phrase a noun phrase, interpret it as referring to a kind of bridge, and treat the phrase as singular—that’s why everyone agrees that one should say The bridge to the islands is crowded, not are crowded. Not so for a coordination, which is headless: it cannot be equated with any of its components. In the coordination the bridge and the causeway, the first noun phrase, the bridge, is singular, and the second noun phrase, the causeway, is also singular, but the coordination as a whole is plural: The bridge and the causeway are crowded, not is crowded.
Perhaps the same is true of case: the case that applies to a whole coordination phrase is not necessarily the same as the case that applies to its parts. When we strive to apply tree-thinking as we write, we may furrow our brows and consciously force the parts to harmonize with the whole. But because coordination phrases are headless, the harmony is not a requirement of our intuitive grammar, and few of us can consistently pull it off. Thus even an assiduous speaker might say Give Al Gore and I a chance or between you and I. The Cambridge Grammar suggests that in contemporary English many speakers have settled on a rule that allows a nominative pronoun like I or he after the coordinator and. And even more of them—the ones who say Me and Amanda are going to the mall—allow an accusative pronoun before and. It is a natural preference, because the accusative is the default case in English, occurring in a motley range of contexts (such as the bare exclamation Me!?), pretty much anywhere it is not preempted by the more selective nominative or genitive.

can versus may. This cartoon explains a traditional rule about two common modal auxiliaries:

At least Mrs. O’Malley didn’t give the standard grown-up’s answer to a child’s request with can: “You can, but the question is, may you?” A colleague of mine recalls that whenever she said, “Daddy, can I ask you a question?” the response was “You just did, but you may ask me another.”
As the puzzlement of the young man in the cartoon suggests, the traditional distinction between the meaning of can (capability or possibility) and the meaning of may (permissibility) is tenuous at best. Even many sticklers don’t have the courage of their convictions, such as the maven who insisted on the distinction in one entry in his usage guide but slipped up in another entry and ruled that a certain verb “can only be followed by for.” (Gotcha! He should have written may.) Conversely, may is commonly and innocuously used for possibility rather than permission, as in It may rain this afternoon.
In formal style we see a slight preference for using may for permission. But as Mrs. O’Malley suggested, it is only when one is asking (or granting) permission that may is preferable, not when one is merely talking about it. The sentence Students can submit their papers anytime Friday might be said by one student to another, butStudents may submit their papers anytime Friday is more likely to be an announcement of the policy by the professor. Since most prose neither grants nor requests permission, the distinction is usually moot, and the two words may (or can) be used more or less interchangeably.

dangling modifiers. Do you see a problem with the sentences that follow?
Checking into the hotel, it was nice to see a few of my old classmates in the lobby.

Turning the corner, the view was quite different.
Born and raised in city apartments, it was always a marvel to me.
In order to contain the epidemic, the area was sealed off.

Considering the hour, it is surprising that he arrived at all.
Looking at the subject dispassionately, what evidence is there for this theory?
In order to start the motor, it is essential that the retroflex cam connecting rod be disengaged.
To summarize, unemployment remains the state’s major economic and social problem.

According to an old rule about “dangling modifiers,” these sentences are ungrammatical. (Sometimes the rule is stated as applying to “dangling participles,” namely the gerund form of a verb ending with –ing or the passive form typically ending in –ed or –en, but the examples include infinitival modifiers as well.) The rule decrees that the implied subject of the modifier (the one doing the checking, turning, and so on) must be identical to the overt subject of the main clause (it, the view, and so on). Most copy editors would recast the main clause, supplying it with a subject (underlined) to which the modifier can be properly fastened:
Checking into the hotel, I was pleased to see a few of my old classmates in the lobby.

Turning the corner, I saw that the view was quite different.
Born and raised in city apartments, I always found it a marvel.
In order to contain the epidemic, authorities sealed off the area.

Considering the hour, we should be surprised that he arrived at all.
Looking at the subject dispassionately, what evidence do we find for this theory?
In order to start the motor, one should ensure that the retroflex cam connecting rod is disengaged.
To summarize, we see that unemployment remains the state’s major economic and social problem.

Newspaper columns on usage are filled with apologies for “errors” like these, spotted by ombudsmen or managing editors who have trained themselves to flag them. Danglers are extremely common, not just in deadline-pressured journalism but in the works of distinguished authors. Considering how often these forms turn up in edited prose and how readily they are accepted even by careful readers, two conclusions are possible: either dangling modifiers are a particularly insidious grammatical error for which writers must develop sensitive radar, or they are not grammatical errors at all. (Did you notice the dangler in the sentence before last?)
The second conclusion is the right one: some dangling modifiers should be avoided, but they are not grammatical errors. The problem with dangling modifiers is that their subjects are inherently ambiguous and sometimes a sentence will inadvertently attract a reader to the wrong choice. Many style guides reproduce (or contrive) dangling modifiers with unintentionally comical interpretations, such as these ones from Richard Lederer’s Anguished English:

Having killed a man and served four years in prison, I feel that Tom Joad is ripe to get into trouble.
Plunging 1,000 feet into the gorge, we saw Yosemite Falls.
As a baboon who grew up wild in the jungle, I realized that Wiki had special nutritional needs.
Locked in a vault for 50 years, the owner of the jewels has decided to sell them.
When a small boy, a girl is of little interest.

It’s easy—and wrong—to diagnose the problem as a violation of a grammatical rule called subject control. Most verbs that take subjectless complements, such as try in Alice tried to calm down, are governed by an ironclad rule that forces the overt subject to be identical to the missing subject. That is, we have to interpret Alice tried to calm down as “Alice tried to get Alice to calm down,” rather than “Alice tried to get someone to calm down” or “Alice tried to get everyone to calm down.” But with modifiers there is no such rule. The missing subject of a modifier is identified with the protagonist whose point of view we are assuming as we read the sentence, which is often, but need not always be, the grammatical subject of the main clause. The problem is not one of ungrammaticality but of ambiguity, as in the examples we saw in chapter 4. The jewelry owner who was locked in a vault for fifty years is like the panel on sex with four professors and the recommendation of the candidate with no qualifications.
Some so-called danglers are perfectly acceptable. Many participles have turned into prepositions, such as according, allowing, barring, concerning, considering, excepting, excluding, failing, following, given, granted, including, owing, regarding, and respecting, and they don’t need subjects at all. Inserting we find or we see into the main clause to avoid a dangler can make the sentence stuffy and self-conscious. More generally, a modifier can dangle when its implied subject is the writer and the reader, as in To summarize and In order to start the motor in the examples above. And when the subject of the main clause is the dummy element it or there, the reader glides right over it, and it poses no danger of attracting a dangler.
The decision of whether to recast a sentence to align its subject with the subject of a modifier is a matter of judgment, not grammar. A thoughtlessly placed dangler can confuse the reader or slow her down, and occasionally it can lure her into a ludicrous interpretation. Also, even if a dangler is in no danger of being misinterpreted, enough readers have trained themselves to spot danglers that a writer who leaves it incurs the risk of being judged as slovenly. So in formal styles it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye open for them and to correct the obtrusive ones.

fused participles (possessives with gerunds). Do you have a problem with the sentence She approved of Sheila taking the job? Do you insist that it should be She approved of Sheila’s taking the job,in which the gerund (taking) has a subject (Sheila’s) that is marked with genitive case? Perhaps you think that the first version, the one with the unmarked subject, is an increasingly common symptom of grammatical laziness. If so, you are a victim of the spurious rule about so-called fused participles. (The term was coined by Fowler to suggest that the participle taking has been illicitly fused with the noun *Sheila *into the mongrel Sheila-taking: the theory made little sense, but the term stuck.) In fact, gerunds with unmarked subjects were the historically earlier form, have long been used by the language’s best writers, and are perfectly idiomatic. Unfusing a participle can make a sentence clumsy or pretentious:

Any alleged evils of capitalism are simply the result of people’s being free to choose.
The police had no record of my car’s having been towed.
I don’t like the delays caused by my computer’s being underpowered.
The ladies will pardon my mouth’s being full.

And often it cannot be done at all:

I was annoyed by the people behind me in line’s being served first.
You can’t visit them without Ethel’s pulling out pictures of her grandchildren.
What she objects to is men’s making more money than women for the same work.
Imagine a child with an ear infection who cannot get penicillin’s losing his hearing.

In these cases, dropping the ’s results in a perfectly acceptable sentence: I was annoyed by the people behind me in line being served first. A substantial majority of the AHD Usage Panel accept the so-called fused participle, not just in these complicated sentences but in simple ones like I can understand him not wanting to go. For sentences that have been repeated verbatim in questionnaires over the decades, the rate of acceptance has increased over time.

How should a writer choose? Any semantic difference between the alternatives is elusive, and the choice mainly hinges on style: the genitive subject (I approve of Sheila’s taking the job) is appropriate in more formal writing, the unmarked subject (I approve of Sheila taking the job) in informal writing and speech. The nature of the grammatical subject matters, too. The clumsy examples above show that long and complicated subjects are best left unmarked, whereas simpler ones like pronouns work well in the genitive, as in I appreciate your coming over to help. Some writers sense a subtle distinction in the focus of attention. When the focus is on the entire event, packaged into a conceptual whole, the genitive subject seems better: if the fact that Sheila is taking the job had been mentioned previously, and we were all discussing whether this was a good thing or a bad thing (not just for Sheila but for the company, her friends, and her family), I might say I approve of *Sheila’s taking the job. *But if the focus is on the subject and her possible courses of action, say, if I was a friend of Sheila’s and had been advising her whether to stay in school or accept the offer, I might say I approve of Sheila taking the job.

if-then.Something is slightly off in these sentences, but what?

If I didn’t have my seat belt on, I’d be dead.
If he didn’t come to America, our team never would have won the championship.
If only she would have listened to me, this would never have happened.

Many conditional constructions (those with an if and a then)seem bewilderingly picky about which tenses, moods, and auxiliaries may go into them, particularly had and would. Fortunately, there is a formula for writing graceful conditionals, and it becomes clear once you recognize two distinctions.
The first is that English has *two *kinds of conditional constructions:

If you leave now, you will get there on time. [an open conditional]
If you left now, you would get there on time. [a remote conditional]

The first is called an open conditional, from the expression “an open possibility.” It refers to a situation that the writer is uncertain about, and it invites the reader to draw inferences or make predictions about that situation. Here are a couple of other examples:

If he is here, he’ll be in the kitchen.
If it rains tomorrow, the picnic will be canceled.

With these conditionals, anything goes: you can use pretty much any tense in the if and then clauses, depending only on when the relevant events take place or are discovered.
The second kind is called a remote conditional, from the expression “a remote possibility.” It refers to a counterfactual, highly improbable, blue-sky, or make-believe world, one that the writer thinks is unlikely to be true but whose implications are worth exploring:

If I were a rich man, I wouldn’t have to work hard.
If pigs had wings, they would fly.

like, as, such as. Long ago, in the Mad Men era when cigarettes were advertised on radio and television, every brand had a slogan. “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.” “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.” And most infamously, “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.”
The infamy did not come from the fact that the company was using a catchy jingle to get people addicted to carcinogens. It came from the fact that the jingle allegedly contained a grammatical error. Like is a preposition, said the accusers, and may take only a noun phrase object, as in crazy like a fox or like a bat out of hell. It is not a conjunction (what I have been calling a coordinator) and so may not be followed by a clause. The New Yorker sneered at the error, Ogden Nash wrote a poem about it, Walter Cronkite refused to say it on the air, and Strunk and White declared it illiterate. The slogan, they agreed, should have been “Winston tastes good, as a cigarette should.” The advertising agency and the tobacco company were delighted by the unpaid publicity and were only too happy to confess to the error in the coda, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?”
Like many usage controversies, the brouhaha over like a cigarette should is a product of grammatical ineptitude and historical ignorance. To start with, the fact that like is a preposition, which typically takes a noun phrase complement, does not mean that it may not take a clausal complement as well. As we saw in chapter 4, many prepositions, such as after and before, take either one, so the question of whether like is a conjunction is a red herring. Even if it is a preposition, it could very well precede a clause.