Taking One for the Team

Thanks for the grammar lesson. I teach technical writing, and I throw in some writing tips here and there, especially for my students who aren’t native speakers of English.

My attitude about passives is pretty much “avoid them if it makes sense to,” but often that’s limited to encouraging the use of first person to distinguish work the writers did from the work of others.

But grammar lessons half a century ago didn’t include several of the terms you use, and I appreciate the introduction to them. 

Great post. I think I need to forward this to my boss and coworkers next time any of them complain about the passive voice in something we’re editing. The other day I was talking to a coworker about a particular article, and she said, “Oh, is that the one with all the passives?” I honestly hadn’t noticed, because apparently none of them had struck me as unclear, overly wordy, or infelicitous. It really is a superstition with many editors, and one that’s hard to talk them out of.

The “plans were disrupted” seems to be a way of getting the plans to the front of the sentence; they are surely implied or mentioned in the preceding matter. That is a perfectly good reason for using the passive.
The “was diagnosed” seems to me to be a special case that goes beyond merely not wanting to name the oncologist, etc. Like Donne’s bell that “tolls for thee”, it is a simple signal with ominous resonances.

“But an unexpected eventuality disrupted all plans” provoked me to have a think about non-passive alternatives, which I’ve put on my webspace rather than clog things up here.

But I could have saved myself the effort if it had occurred to me sooner to google the phrase “was diagnosed with”. This mostly turns up nasty diseases. It almost seems like a kind of fixed phrase for: here comes the bad news. Which makes it even odder that anyone would recommend changing it in this context.

PS I quite like being able to edit comments. First time I’ve seen this feature.

I teach high school English, and I tell my students that the passive should be used (heheh) when one doesn’t know or doesn’t care who did the action in the sentence. Or, to put it another way, if the action is more important than the actor, passive voice is called for (again, heheh).

I was amazed recently when I read the section on passives in my workplace’s style guide for official documents, and found that the advice it offered was actually good: “this is what a passive is (and it got it right!); here are some examples where active is better; here are some examples where passive is better. Use whichever is appropriate. If in doubt, active is a safer bet because some people have an irrational hatred of passives.”

I was so convinced it would be offering the usual terrible advice that I had to read it twice before I could believe my eyes!

A good example of this kind of use, from Ambrose Bierce’s story “Parker Adderson, Philosopher”:

“Ten minutes later Sergeant Parker Adderson, of the Federal army,
philosopher and wit, kneeling in the moonlight and begging incoherently
for his life, was shot to death by twenty men.”

Parker Adderson is one of the two principal characters and the story is about his coming to the point of begging for his life. To turn this sentence around and start with the twenty men, none of whom we know or care about, would be absurd.

And there are then of course those kinds of constructions in which a passive HAS to be used:

a. The man was nearly flattened by a runaway car but then got up.

b. *A runaway car nearly flattened the man but then got up.

Sebntence (b) is starred as ungrammatical if it is supposed to mean that the man got up. It is of course perfectly grammatical if it is taken to mean that the car got up. I.e. There is an English rule, or grammatical pattern,  that allows deletion of a subject of the second of the two coordinate clauses if it is identical to the subject of the first. The passive in (a)’s first clause gets ‘man’ into subject position so the underlying subject ‘man’ in the second can be deleted.

Now of course one could pronominalize ’man’ in the second clause of (b) and have

b-prn.  A runaway car nearly flattened the man but then [he] got up.

But that’s a different sentence with a change in focus. The point is that while both (a) and (b-prn) are grammatical English sentences and understood in the same way, (b) is ungrammatical unless understood in a quite different way.

Well put, Pullum! To be freed from the incessant, schoolmarmish finger-wagging of the grammar advicemongers, whose zeal tends to far outstrip their knowledge… well, ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.

I agree that the passive voice becomes pernicious when it is used to evade responsibility – ‘mistakes were made’ being the classic, though not worst, example. The result, rhetorically, is actions without actors, deeds without doers.

If only the passive-voice police had been around to stamp out this bad writing when it first appeared:

“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Genesis II.23, KJV

“To die: to sleep: / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to; ‘tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d.” Shakespeare, Hamlet III.1

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Not your best work, Prof. Pullum; less an interesting take on academic language and more a passive aggressive swipe at someone who did you the favor of reading you work in progress. 

Wait till this is seen by Doyne!

Passive constructions are also typical in the Method sections of published research.

Why do course descriptions need to be in the active voice to be energetic, gripping, etc? The passive voice isn’t what Strunk/White thought it was, ie an attack against the linguistic piquancy.

“passive-aggressive”; “your work”

You’re welcome.

Well, except when one gets the actor[s] wrong …  Should include:

Those who expect[ed] something for nothing, like a never-ending increase in equity, so that one may borrow the full amount, nothing down, and likewise not pay interest on an interest-bearing note/mortgage/lien … and those who invested in ‘securitized’ subprime loans, and those who continue to elect said politicians and continue to invest in said Wall Street creations — including many of the critics of same, and those who continue to eat from the hands of said cretins and subhumans … [hmm ... sounds a bit fascist/nazi/communist ?]

Two observations:
(1) “(The disastrously confused Page 18 of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style is often implicated—but don’t get me started on them.)” Would “them” refer to “Strunk and White’s” (a compound possessive adjective, unworthy as a pronoun referent) or “Elements”?
(2) ““But all plans were disrupted when she was diagnosed in December 2010 with metastasized and inoperable terminal cancer.’” Grammar is a means to an emphasis. If you wish to accentuate the plans’ “gang aft agley”, fine as written. To write “In December, terminal cancer disrupted all plans” is also fine – if you wish to emphasize the disruptor rather than the disrupted.

Bravo.

Do you have any evidence for this claim?  BTW, Maori has both an active and a passive, but passives occur rather more often than actives. British occupying Aotearoa, New Zealand, did not find the Maori to be exactly “passive” in thinking or behavior.  

Your underlying premise in point 1 is simply wrong. See http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/possessives.html

Your proposed alternative in the active strikes me as dinstinctly inferior to Prof. Pullum’s original, but I suppose de gustibus non disputandum.

(1) I did see the berkeley link: “But Kevin Keegan, a high-school journalism teacher from Silver Spring, Md., protested that a number of grammar books assert that it is incorrect to use a pronoun with a possessive antecedent like “Tony Morrison’s”   that is, unless the pronoun is itself a possessive, as in “Toni Morrison’s fans adore her books.”….After months of exchanges with the tenacious Mr. Keegan, the College Board finally agreed to adjust the scores of students who had marked the underlined pronoun “her” as incorrect. In the phrase “on them”, “them” is not a possessive.
(2) Quis vos votum innuo. Grammar est opes ut an gravitas.

But at least he identified who endowed them.

Good lord, thanks for the article. English is my second language (I grew up in Spain) and the constant, incessant nagging from editors and MS Word on how many passives I use drives me bonkers. It is just terrible advice to target a specific verb voice as bad writing, specially one that has a clear, specific use. Spanish might be more flexible than English when using passive, but the general aversion to it is just plain idiotic. 

I totally agree with you.  I can remember when a well known word processor app would flag instances of “passive voice” in my texts.  Well, that is what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.  I speak and write English in my personality.  That’s just my style…get over it.

Looks like playful professional badinage to me.  ;-)

It is to be noted that three subjects of instruction recommend/require ignorance over knowledge: religion, sex, and grammar.

What a great style guide!

I assume that by “passive writing”, you mean the grammatical construction called the passive voice, which is what this post original and thread have been about. If you’re going to claim a correlation, let alone a causal connexion, between use of the passive voice in writing (or speaking) and “passive thinking and behaving”, you actually have to offer some evidence. I cannot find any whatsoever in anything you have said here or in the material you gave us a link to.

     You gave us a link to Rachel Toor’s CHE Article (April 2010)praise of George Orwell’s ”Politics and the English Language”. Well good. You will have noticed then that she only has one short passage referring to Passive Voice, and it presents no evidence at all.  Now in the original Orwell essay, I can find absolutely no reference to, let alone any discussion of, the Passive v. the Active. Perhaps it is buried in there amidst his many passive voice sentences and I missed it. But the only reference I find to it is his list of rules wherein the 4th one is an admonition to us to don’t use it where we can use the active.  An admonition is neither argument nor evidence.

     You will also of course have read all 83 of the comments to Rachel Toor’s ode to Orwell. You will have found the link Nordicexpat gave is in comment 3 to David Beaver (a real linguist)’s strongly negative review of Orwell’s essay. You will also have noted my comment 43 in which I pointed out that the active sentence

      “Somebody made mistakes.”  

  conveys no more information than does the passive

      “Mistakes were made.” 

  You may have also noted Todd Gilman’ Comment 67 in which he cites Geofffey Pullum’s scathing review of Stunk, er, Strunk & White, which I repeat here:

   Pullum, G. K.  
    2009 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice. The Chronicle [of Higher
Education] Review.  17 April.

You are of course free to “disagree completely with Professor Pullum” on the matter of the use of the passive voice or on any other.  But aside from reference to your “observations of student writing”,  you gave no evidence at all for the reason you stated, that “Passive writing breeds passive thinking and behaving”. An assertion is not an argument; and it is certainly not data. Nothing I could find in the link you provided made such an outright claim, let alone offerred any evidence supporting it.  And there is considerable evidence from Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology suggesting it is not true. I gave you one such piece of evidence, — the notably greater occurrence of passives over actives in Maori. You did not address that at all. So my question stands. Do you have any evidence for your claim that “Passive writing [i.e. the passive voice ? jff] breeds passive thinking and behaving.”?

but “the doctors” or even just “doctors” are superfluous, if not downright distracting. Do we really need to be told that the diagnosis was made by doctors rather than plumbers, electricians or librarians?
And do we know that “we” is appropriate for the obituary writer and the deceased, or that he and she were the only people who had to change their plans?

>In Venice was died
German has subjectless intransitive passives that can even do without the dummy subject es. In Venedig wurde gestorben doesn’t make much sense, but if we embellish it a bit, e.g. In Venedig wird besonders im Spätherbst gern gestorben, wenn der Nebel sich wochenlang über die Stadt legt… then it begins to say something.

Maybe one of the better-known occurrences is “O’zapft is’!“, which the Oberbürgermeister of Munich shouts when he has succeeeded in tapping the first barrel of the Oktoberfest.

Yes, you can have intransitive passives, which I think is what you mean, in German and in a number of other languages.  _Es wird gegangen._, for instance. Literally “It becomes gone.”, usually translated into English as something like
   ‘Someone will go.’ or,
  ‘There’ll be (a) going.’.    

Another fairly common one is _Es wird gesungen_.’    ‘There will be singing.’  

A number of languages can do this; English of course is not among them.

Small point — don’t mourn “the demise of teaching grammar in grammar school”. 
English grammar was never taught in Anglophone grammar schools. What was taught was Latin. That’s where one learned grammar (because one can’t pick up Latin conversationally, one must learn its grammar to succeed). Once one has done this, one looks back at English and thinks “Oh. I see now how all that works.” And one then applies Latin grammar to English, and it sort of works, and that’s close enough for government work.But English classes were always composition and literature. If the teacher knew Latin (pretty universal until the mid-20th century), then the teacher could use Latin grammatical terminology with some consistency, and that was helpful. But if not (pretty universal for several generations now), all an English teacher can do is parrot the catechism of shibboleths and make students identify the Principal Parts of every word, so that what the credulous student now learns is garbage. Most students, however, are smart enough to recognize a crock when they encounter it, so they very wisely ignore it.

Well, none of them is particularly good in the “instruction” department, are they?

Thanks for this article, it made me grimace in recognition — just shows formulaic criticism (of anything) is a rocky, potholed road. 

I think it was Somerset Maugham who described one the most ‘irresistible human urges’ as the desire to tweak someone else’s manuscript.It is, also, of course, fairly irresistible to want to look at one’s critic’s own performance … as you did. Gotcha. 
- Peter
http://www.ThePaepae.com

Too much honour, this was not ‘my’ sentence – I could never generate something so elaborate. It has been published though. I agree with you that it needs more than grammar-fixing. But, apparently, the editors thought otherwise….

Just seen In an MSN money article:

‘There’s a little more to the Best Buy’s press release: “We are very
sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, and we have notified the
affected customers.”
Again, note the use of the passive voice —
“this” refers to the “situation” that Best Buy “encountered.” The
“situation,” not Best Buy’s poor operations, “has caused” inconvenience
to customers. It’s not something Best Buy did wrong.’

It’s hard to note the use of the passive voice when it is not present!

http://money.msn.com/investing/why-best-buy-is-destined-to-fail-forbes.aspx?page=3