How not to write 5/ Don’t obey imaginary rules

When you give style tips, a malign god guarantees that you produce howlers, as your correspondent knows to his cost. Editors at the Times should have known it as well, and made sure that their columnist Emma Duncan was on her guard before she wrote a grim piece celebrating the decline in the number of students studying English literature. 

No one warned her. And readers of the Times were presented with

Literature is lovely stuff but it’s not a way to earn your bread. Universities do our young people no favours if they encourage them to devote a crucial three years of their lives and rack up piles of debt studying for unremunerative degrees.”

I make that one redundancy, stuff, one dusty instance of archaic slang earn your bread, and one train crash devote a crucial three years of their lives and rack up piles of debt studying for unremunerative degrees.

A student of English literature, who ignored the Times’s miserable advice to abandon art that makes life worth living, might have knocked her copy into passable prose in seconds

Literature is lovely stuff but it’s not a way to earn your bread make money. Universities do our young people no favours if they encourage them to devote a crucial three years of their lives and to racking up piles of debt by studying for unremunerative degrees.

The use of stuff rankles almost as much as the argument.

Turn to the Economist, another high-brow publication, and you find it is stuffed with stuff.  The stuffing is in homage to one of the many bogus rules that plague the English language. Allow me to explain what’s wrong with it with examples.