>
> This touches on one of the interesting - and, to be honest, appealing -
> aspects of Marxism: it's at once an "elitist" and a radically egalitarian
> doctrine. Marx himself made few compromises to appeal to a popular audience;
> even the Manifesto requires the reading skills of a high-school graduate
> (according to Microsoft Word's grammar checker, which recommends documents
> aspire to the 7th or 8th grade level!). Lenin and Trotsky had high cultural
> expectations for the working class - they wanted proletarians to assimilate
> the best of bourgeois culture. In fact, raising the cultural level of the
> working class seemed central to their revolutionary project. That didn't
> last through the 1920s. That's never been too big a part of the American
> left, has it? My Pacifica colleagues mostly frown on anything that smacks of
> elitism.
There's a question about whether Strunk and White makes for good elitism, though. Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log has been running a crusade against S&W for years.
http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
[...]
Notice what I am objecting to is not the style advice in Elements, which might best be described the way The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes Earth: mostly harmless. Some of the recommendations are vapid, like "Be clear" (how could one disagree?). Some are tautologous, like "Do not explain too much." (Explaining too much means explaining more than you should, so of course you shouldn't.) Many are useless, like "Omit needless words." (The students who know which words are needless don't need the instruction.) Even so, it doesn't hurt to lay such well-meant maxims before novice writers.
Even the truly silly advice, like "Do not inject opinion," doesn't really do harm. (No force on earth can prevent undergraduates from injecting opinion. And anyway, sometimes that is just what we want from them.) But despite the "Style" in the title, much in the book relates to grammar, and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious. Since today it provides just about all of the grammar instruction most Americans ever get, that is something of a tragedy. Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them, but that is not true of the grammar stipulations...
[...]
After this unpromising start, there is some fairly sensible style advice: The authors explicitly say they do not mean "that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice," which is "frequently convenient and sometimes necessary." They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.
Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle everything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word's grammar checker underlines every passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done.
[...]
The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements. The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn.