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For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long senten

For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.

bradrn 5y ago
And the sad thing is, they don’t even know what the passive voice is! See G. K. Pullum, Fear and Loathing of the English Passive [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html]. Their unintentional hypocrisy is quite something, e.g.: > … it makes little difference if you decide to look at prose written by the advisers on usage themselves. Consider the beginning of E. B. White's introduction to his revision of The Elements of Style (Strunk & White 2000). I underline the head verbs of the passive VPs … Six instances of transitive verbs appear here: took, called, required, called, known, and printed. Five of them are in the passive. That's over 83 percent.
- Causality1 5y ago
  I wonder how much it contributed to the recent rise of present-tense fiction, which I find unpleasant to read.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  A lot of that article feels like too much of a gotcha. There is a difference between "Alice died of a gunshot wound" and "Bob fatally shot Alice". The fact that neither one is passive voice according to the author's definition doesn't mean that people are wrong for being upset if Bob is left out of the headline. It really seems like missing the point to counter complaints that Bob isn't suitably blamed in a headline by pointing out that the grammar is fine!
  - Renevith 5y ago
    But it also seems like missing the point for people to criticize that headline for a grammatical error (falsely!) when they really just want Bob to be named... which is exactly the point of that article, right?
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      They weren't criticizing the headline for a grammatical error (after all, passive voice isn't grammatically wrong). Rather they were using incorrect grammatical terminology to express their actual complaint: that the emphasis wasn't on Bob for committing murder!

bradrn 5y ago

And the sad thing is, they don’t even know what the passive voice is! See G. K. Pullum, Fear and Loathing of the English Passive [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html]. Their unintentional hypocrisy is quite something, e.g.: > … it makes little difference if you decide to look at prose written by the advisers on usage themselves. Consider the beginning of E. B. White's introduction to his revision of The Elements of Style (Strunk & White 2000). I underline the head verbs of the passive VPs … Six instances of transitive verbs appear here: took, called, required, called, known, and printed. Five of them are in the passive. That's over 83 percent.

Causality1 5y ago
I wonder how much it contributed to the recent rise of present-tense fiction, which I find unpleasant to read.
seoaeu 5y ago
A lot of that article feels like too much of a gotcha. There is a difference between "Alice died of a gunshot wound" and "Bob fatally shot Alice". The fact that neither one is passive voice according to the author's definition doesn't mean that people are wrong for being upset if Bob is left out of the headline. It really seems like missing the point to counter complaints that Bob isn't suitably blamed in a headline by pointing out that the grammar is fine!
- Renevith 5y ago
  But it also seems like missing the point for people to criticize that headline for a grammatical error (falsely!) when they really just want Bob to be named... which is exactly the point of that article, right?
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    They weren't criticizing the headline for a grammatical error (after all, passive voice isn't grammatically wrong). Rather they were using incorrect grammatical terminology to express their actual complaint: that the emphasis wasn't on Bob for committing murder!