In a response to a comment, you say that linguists treat prescriptivism as a straw-man and reject it outright. I would say that linguists don’t really care about those kind of prescriptivists who give sensible advice about writing grammatically and writing well. For instance, if someone writes a trashy novel, and that novel is lambasted by a reviewer for being trashy, I don’t expect linguists to reject this whole exercise as ‘prescriptivism’. But if the reviewer starts saying that the novel’s trashiness was to be expected because it had loads of passive clauses, linguists would be perfectly correct in taking the reviewer apart for this.

It’s only the annoying ones, whose stupid and wrong advice is considered gospel truth by people around the word and causes widespread misery (students lose grades because they end sentences with prepositions, for instance) that linguists hate, and very rightly so.

A good author does not, by virtue of his writing skills, become qualified to give unverified ‘writing advice’ simply because writing well and being able to describe language are too very different things. Imagine a guy considering himself to be qualified to talk about gravity because, on jumping off a building, he plummets to the ground!

Language Log, for instance, frequently refers to the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (MWDEU), where people can find reliable facts about whatever usage they are confused about rather than listening to personal value judgments by ‘usage-book-writers’ who don’t often have the slightest training in grammar and who mostly spew out absolute nonsense that is picked up by people who don’t know better and who trust their scholarship.

Also, giving good, authentic and useful writing advice is easier said than done, simply because good writing is a very elusive thing that usually comes with years of practice and effort and cannot be condensed becometo a bunch of pithy rules that would fill a pocket-sized usage-guide.

“people want language advice from experts, and they’re certainly not getting it from linguists. The industry of bad language advice exists partly because the people who arguably know the most about how language really works—the linguists—aren’t at all interested in giving advice on language”

Most usage guides that people ‘respect’ often make wrong assertions about grammar and are full of boring and obvious style advice—most adults would understand that brevity is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that we treat ‘Avoid needless words’ as the Lord’s word and slash students’ marks for using the complementizer ‘that’ wherever grammar permits it to be omitted. I doubt how any real ‘good’ writing can be taught by such pointless edicts. Works of most good authors rarely go by such rules, and for good reason. There is clearly more to ‘good writing’ than what the prescriptivists claim when they give their ‘rules’.

I think linguists realize that giving useful writing advice is not trivial. Rather, linguists would devote their time into creating something like the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which needs about 1600 pages to give an account of Modern English Grammar (it’s not a pocket-sized compendium!) or the MWDEU, which tracks actual usage of thousands of words and phrases and presents you the bare facts instead of sitting by the arm-chair, theorizing about how language is, which is what Strunk & White seem to have done in The EoS. These books are the work of linguists, and this is their contribution to the field of ‘good writing’. Are they too big and bulky? Do they not have the compact elegance of style guides? Of course they are, and of course they don’t, and for good reason.

By the way, I run a linguistics blog too. Have a look if you want to: blog.linguistrix.com

Language is certainly natural in the sense that we have a natural impulse to acquire and use it, but it’s certainly not natural in the same way that star formation or plate tectonics or weather are. Those things happen as a result of natural forces. Language may be the product of evolutionary forces, but it’s something we deliberately use and manipulate

In a nutshell, I think that linguists too often treat language as a natural system that exists independent of and detached from language users, and I think that misses something fundamental about language.

You’re right that usage writers’ opinions about a usage are part of the evidence that should be considered. That’s one of the reasons I like Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage so much.

One of my main points is that the definition of prescriptivism that linguists typically throw around is something of a straw man or at least an extreme negative example of the phenomenon. I think that by default we’re all prescriptive in our approach to language, because we’re all concerned with how we should shape our own language behavior (and occasionally others’).

I think that even by your definition, virtually everyone is a prescriptivist. I don’t think the average speaker really thinks about the objective facts of language (when they consciously consider language at all). People think of the rules and how they’re either following or breaking them.

I’m not convinced that you need to consider rules to have the authority of fact to be a prescriptivist, because I don’t think it’s a relevant issue in everyday language use—or rather, I don’t think it uses a broad enough definition of “fact.” You can talk about how the less/fewer distinction is contrived and not supported by current or historic usage, but the fact remains that people will judge you negatively if you flout the rule.

And this is what I think linguists often miss when they talk about linguistic facts: people’s opinions of language are facts, too. As David Foster Wallace argues in “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” you can argue all you want about how it’s not a fact that men should not wear skirts and how men wear skirts in other cultures and it’s totally arbitrary and so why can’t we, but when all is said and done you’re not going to send your son to school in a skirt. It might as well have the authority of fact that men cannot wear skirts in mainstream American society.

Of course, the no-skirts-for-men rule is a rather extreme example. Most grammar rules as people know them are not even close to being that unbreakable. But as to the rest of your comment, I think we’re essentially in agreement. I’m all for spirited (but informed) discussion about language. There are those prescriptivists out there who think that every grammar rule is inviolable, but I think most people are more reasonable and flexible than that.

(I think that “spontaneous” was indeed the right word—I meant changes that have no [apparent] outside impetus, not ones that happen instantaneously.)

If you define a prescriptivist as someone who is in favour of prescription, then of course we are all prescriptivists. Pretty much everyone is in favour of prescription in some circumstances, if only as a pragmatic measure. However, I would reject that definition, and suggest the following. A prescriptivist is someone who considers rules about what’s right and wrong in language[*], even if not supported by descriptive means, to have the authority of fact.

A descriptivist, as I see it, is someone who maintains that rules about language[*] which cannot be supported by descriptive means should not be presented as fact. In my comment on Stan Carey’s post, I put it this way: “the essence of descriptivism is that aesthetic preferences about language should not be mistaken for objective facts“.

A sensible next question is, if you don’t present them as facts then how should you present them, and from the possible answers to that question we can identify subspecies of descriptivist. On one hand, there’s the descriptivist who thinks that aesthetic preferences about language are not worth talking about, the kind you apparently had in mind when you asked, “why should we always be coolly dispassionate about it?“. On the other hand, there’s the descriptivist who thinks that people should express their preferences as passionately as they please, and is perfectly willing, on occasion, to join in the debate. That is my own position. Let us all engage in spirited debate about what makes good writing, but let us not state as fact that this is right and that is wrong.

[*]Or more specifically, whichever aspect of language we happen to be concerned with, e.g. syntax. The importance of this distinction is underlined by this article by Geoff Pullum.

(P.S. Surely “spontaneous” isn’t really the right word to describe natural changes that can take a very long time to be fully established.)