Writing Well in the 21st Century: The Five Essentials by Linda Spencer (review)

In the title of this book, freelance writer and editor Linda Spencer reveals a foundational premise about American English: writing ‘well’ is a relative, contextualized, transmutable concept. So-called grammar purists, then, must relax their iron grip on language, since the ‘worldwide user audience is changing English usage and style’ and common use ‘determines acceptable American English usage’ (1).¹ My linguistic conservatism causes me to sigh at the implication that the prudishly pleasurable concept of ‘correctness,’ now somehow an anachronism, has been superseded by its effete stepchild, ‘acceptability,’ which reflects the whims and appetencies of hoi polloi. But, with English, such has always been the case: living languages evolve. Spencer knows, then, that we need to check in periodically with the state of affairs of our written language, particularly when more and more people around the globe are using it. Hence her Writing Well in the 21st Century: The Five Essentials.

After a brief introduction about the vicissitudes of American English, chapters on each of her five essentials—punctuation, grammar, facts, style (mechanical and substantive), and voice—form the heart of the book. As foundational concepts for non-fiction text, one could argue, these five are immutable; the details are what change. To write non-fiction well in any setting, one must master these five elements of language, presented here in order of developmental import. The chapters shorten as the book progresses, though, which leads me to believe that the primary intended audience may be undergraduate students or writers for public consumption (say, online) who have yet to master the ‘basics.’ Or perhaps Spencer acknowledges that the harder-to-refine fundamentals of substantive style and voice, at least, are slightly more stable. Indeed, she directs readers to classic works on the matters by the likes of Strunk and White, Williams, and Zinsser.²

The earlier chapters reveal technical situations that Spencer believes are now acceptable in written English. With respect to punctuation, she comments on the fashionable closing up of prefixes (repay, prenuptial) but bucks the trend herself by preferring to retain hyphens in the cases of contiguous vowels (anti-establishment, pre-election). Spencer points out that dashes often replace commas, semicolons, colons, and parentheses in online writing—but doesn’t state whether she agrees with this practice. She refers to commas that emphasize contrasts as ‘necessary’ (27), but I am perplexed by the examples she invokes; I would strike the commas in both of these sample sentences: ‘Her speech was factual, yet interesting’ (27), and ‘The snow storm lasted only an hour, but dumped six inches of snow on the town’ (69). Yet I agree wholeheartedly with Spencer’s insistence on maintaining internal consistence within a document, particularly with the use of commas:

The Punctuation Police will come after you if you are inconsistent—using series commas on page 1 of your document but no series commas on page 5. Whatever punctuation system you choose, use that system consistently throughout the document you are writing or editing.

(20)³

In her discussion of grammar, Spencer points out that starting sentences with conjunctions is acceptable, as is ending them with prepositions. (I still find endorsing the latter difficult.) She indicates that certain indefinite pronouns (such as everyone and everybody) can now be referenced with the plural pronoun their, as in ‘Everyone brought their lunches to the meeting’ (61, original emphases). (I cringe yet understand.)⁴ I don’t know why she suggests using more lovely and most lovely over the perfectly acceptable lovelier and loveliest (66). And Spencer obviously believes that the split infinitive is now so commonplace that it is not worth mentioning, although advertent readers will notice that she employs more than a dozen herself.⁵ Overall, though, I am unsure how helpful...