Hacker Training

Today The Wife forwarded me an article about training "anti-hackers" from The Chronicle of Higher Education.  (Read it fast, I think the link expires in a week.)  Anti-hackers are computer geeks who protect computers from intrusion instead of breaking into them.  The training program, run by Syracuse University and the Air Force, appears to be aimed at ROTC students, since it includes things like leadership training, physical fitness, and regular room inspections.  Most interesting to me, though, were the rules governing the writing style of students' weekly reports.

Here's how the article describes the rules:

The rules that seem most onerous to many of the students are the ones covering writing style. They include the following:

• Students cannot use colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, or question marks, nor can they separate a phrase with a dash. No sentence can begin with the words "and," "but," or "because."
• Students cannot use apostrophes for any reason, not even for contractions or possessive nouns.
• Students cannot use passive voice, or words like "could," "would," and "should." Instead, they must use "must" to describe a policy or requirement.
• Students cannot end a sentence with a preposition.

"The goal is to communicate, not to impress," says Mr. Jabbour. "Simplicity improves communication."

Some of these rules are old prescriptivist chestnuts (and might even be good advice), but some of them are new to me and seem foolish.  Taking them one by one in the order they seem interesting:

No colons

I guess I could live with this one, but I don't see the point.  Suppose I wanted to mention a long list of items.  I would probably write something like, "This consists of six parts: A, B, C, D, E, and F."  That's a perfectly clear, perfectly standard English sentence.  How has simplicity been compromised?  If colons were banned, I'd just rewrite it, "This consists of six parts, namely A, B, C, D, E, and F," which is basically equivalent in meaning but needlessly wordier.

No semicolons

This one strikes me as most nearly reasonable.  It's not as if anyone knows what semicolons are for, anyway, and forbidding them might limit the tendency of some writers towards convoluted run-on sentences.  In fact, Andrew Sullivan recent wrote that no lesser a personage than Michael Kinsley enforced a similar policy: "I actually have some vague memory of Mike Kinsley, when he was my (inspirational) boss at The New Republic, having a single key on his keyboard that would convert all semi-colons into a period, followed by a capital letter."

No dashes

Like the rule against semicolons, this probably isn't bad advice if you want to keep your writing simple.  There's a problem with it, though: I love dashes (Alt+0151 is my best friend)!  I'm sure I could quit any time I want, but I don't want.

No exclamation marks or question marks

This is fairly standard writing advice to students, I think.  I certainly remember being taught that there was never a reason to include an exclamation mark in a term paper.  Excluding question marks seems a little overzealous, though—what about rhetorical questions?

No passive voice; No ending a sentence with a preposition; No sentences beginning with a conjunction

These are all very standard advice, and even if they're misguided in some cases (say it with me now: "up with which I will not put"), the students in the anti-hacker program might as well get used to them, because they're thoroughly ingrained in the academic writing culture.

No "would", "could", or "should"

This one's odd.  I think it might be a case of confusing certain words with the arguments they're sometimes used to express.  Perhaps the instructors want to discourage their students from dealing in needless hypotheticals and excuse-making—"woulda, coulda, shoulda"—but if so, they've overreached and banned some very useful auxiliary verbs.  Consider the following invented sentences, which I consider clear and non-weasely, for example:

• Although such a circumstance should never occur, the program is robust enough to handle it without crashing.
• An experienced intruder would never make this mistake, of course, but a novice might.
• The system could have crashed at any time under this load.

In none of these cases is there a (straightforward) rewording using "must" that means the same thing.

No apostrophes for any reason

I saved this one for last because it's sheer lunacy.  It is, I admit, standard advice to avoid contractions in formal writing (although some constructions such as tag questions sound terrible without them).  But what's this business about no possessives?  It's true that you can often rephrase English possessives of the form "A's B" as "the B of A", but that can produce really awkward sentences.  Worse that that, what are students supposed to do with idioms or technical terminology that includes possessives?  Should "a moment's thought" be written as "the thought of a moment", or "Pascal's Triangle" referred to as "The Triangle of Pascal"?  What about Irish names like O'Keefe?  And what if the students want to distinguish, in standard C notation, between the character 's' and the string "s"?

Has any of you ever encountered this prohibition on apostrophes in school?  I'm curious to know if it's common advice, or just some kind of weird Air Force orthographic hazing.