No More 50-Percent Rule for Online Education

Caro’s piece is touching, and the judge’s stated reason for not choosing it as the winner is foolish, but I see no real reason to pin the blame for this foolishness on Strunk and White, who, despite their generally sound advice, have inexplicably become the whipping boys of all too many of those who comment on matters of style. In fact, you could just as easily say that the judge here is ignoring one of S&W’s wisest injunctions: against the use of a synonym for no reason other than to avoid repeating a word.

Nobody’s going to emerge from a quick read of The Elements of Style a suddenly better writer (or your money back!), and it would be idiotic and probably impossible to apply each of the prescriptions therein to each line of your own writing, but there’s quite a bit in the book to learn from, as long as you don’t go about it slavishly. In short, I don’t think Strunk and White are in any way to blame for the delusions of their readers (many of whom, it seems, happen to teach composition).

What is the saddest thing here to me is that, unlike “Jim wrote a letter to Jane and I,” which is a straightforward grammatical error – we do still have accusative in English – this judge looked not at the impact of the writing but, instead, brought up the seemingly-inevitable “error” of using too many not-active-enough verbs.  tjfarrel hit the proverbial nail on the head.  Written this way was beautiful.  Writing it with an eye on being sure to use lots of active verbs….well, I can’t get rid of two of them in a way that makes the piece better.  If the judge thinks it would be better “if Caro had found another way to construct one or two active sentences without the verb ‘to be’,” I invite them to show us!

Moral authority was abdicated with their use of the phrase, “100 words or less”, in the challenge.

 I’m convinced that most people who are this offended by passive voice would be much happier if they stuck to reading and writing toaster oven manuals.

Honestly.  I tried to leave this comment alone.  I had my say (above) and went away.  I thought I was a recovering addict … but I guess I’m not recovering.

There is no sentence fragment in the piece.  And all the rest of the punctuation is rhetorically defensible.  3rdtyrant’s reference to “the  flaw of over-using to be verbs” presupposes (wrongly) what Pullum’s essay calls into question (rightly).

I will NOT nitpick the rest.  I can just quit.  Of course, if I COULD just quit,    ……………………………………………………………

You forgot to mention 3rdtyrant’s annoying too-cool-for-school pose (“I don’t know why you people are getting so worked up about all this”). Otherwise, good job.

 A word is not a distance, sum of money, unit of time, or statistical enumeration.  Those are only appropriate exceptions, because discrete units have been artificially assigned to continuous measures.  You can have half of a dollar or go a third of a mile, but you cannot use an eighth of a word. 

The usage is no more correct than “10 items or less” at the supermarket, and anyone who can’t figure that out is unqualified to criticize use of the passive voice.

This is a stylistic preference that cannot be deemed correct or incorrect without reference to a particular style guide.
The MLA handbook agrees with you; however, the corporate style guide at the multinational, European-headquartered company that employs me does not.

So Lee chokes on a couple passive-voice and a couple active-voice sentences with “to be,” yet has no problem swallowing the loathsome “wanna” and the vile “‘cuz”? Well, well. Of course it would be pedantic to worry about such matters in first-person fiction, but at least there’s a coherent position against so-called phonetic spelling. The weakness of “to be” sentences is, imo, utterly imaginary. Shakespeare, I believe, used “to be” pretty effectively twice in one line, as I recall.

In the sauce-for-the-gander department, let’s check out Lee’s own prose. Three active-verb sentences, followed by “Megan
Riggs will always be Megan Riggs,” which I believe is in the future tense, with the predicate–the horror, the horror–”to be.” Next comes “Never just Megan,” which seems to lack a predicate, so it hardly qualifies as a sentence. The next circle in our descent into hell, “So I like that
quality in Caro’s submission,” seems to be trying unsuccessfully to link up with what came before, but the “so” at the beginning is, shall we say, infelicitous. Ditto “Plus it also reveals a keen yearning,” and perhaps “it” is clearer to others than it is to me. We do have a complete sentence in “The
name feels talismanic,” which may even mean something, not that I get it. In “I suspect early mid-life crisis blended with
nostalgia in the story and I identify,” I suspect that one really ought to be more specific about where or in what one suspects early mid-life crisis blended with nostalgia, not that I’d care for such a cocktail, and unless I’m mistaken, “I identify” could really use a direct object, such being the preference of transitive verbs. (If “identify” is intransitive here, I fail to understand what Lee is becoming identical with. Perhaps Lee means “understand” or even, ulp, “can relate to that.”) Since Lee was doing the judging, “I believe if Caro had
found another way to construct one or two active sentences without the
verb ‘to be’, she would have emerged the winner” must be taken at face value; no one else can say different. I don’t get the point, the function, or the other-than-space-filling function of the first word in “Regardless, I found her story outstanding.”

It seems to me Caro writes at least as well as Lee, at least as far as these samples show.

 gavin_moodie: Newspapers that use all-cap headlines add apostrophes to abbreviations like TA because, as you can imagine, a plural like “TAS” would be hard to read in a headline. As would  “CVS” (CV’s), “PH.D.S” (Ph.D.’s), CEOS, (CEO’s), and a lot of other abbreviations that appear frequently in our pages. The apostrophe isn’t a perfect solution, as you note, but that’s the reason The New York Times Manual of Style, which The Chronicle follows, uses it for plurals of abbreviations.

Again, not a barbarism (nor a grocer’s apostrophe), but – according to many style guides – a perfectly acceptable pluralization of an acronym. You might not like it, but it’s not incorrect.  Professional writers and editors have to adhere to the style guides of the publishing house or organization for which they write. If, when writing for my employer, I were to omit the apostrophe from “TAs,” my editor would mark it for correction. He’s not wrong to do so (and it doesn’t reflect his personal preference!), he’s merely ensuring that I follow our style guide.

If I understand your reasoning, you see “thousands of teacher’s” and “millions of TA’s” as analogous constructions.  The apostrophe in “teacher’s” is superfluous and wrong; therefore, the equally superfluous apostrophe on TA’s is equally wrong.  Same form.  Same “function.”  Same analysis: the grocer’s apostrophe.  Sorry, but it’s a false analogy.

If you would look it up any number of relevant style manuals, you would find a rule about pluralizing symbols, numbers, letters, abbreviations, words used as words (I’m probably forgetting something from the list).  Some will say you MUST pluralize items from the list  with apostrophes; some will INSIST that you NOT pluralize with apostrophes; some will say you have a stylistic ALTERNATIVE: make a choice and stay consistent.  The fact that nobody (hyperbole!) knows what to do with the “dos and don’ts” shows you how useless trying to follow the rules can be.  The near universal compromise on “do’s and don’ts” shows you how effective rules can fail to be.

The phrase “thousands of teacher’s” (you expect me to make a joke about putting the apostrophe “after the s”?) never makes it into the list as a symbol, a number, a letter, an abbreviation, or a word used as a word.  (Some people throw names into the list, and end up referring to their families as the “Hatfield’s” and “McCoy’s.”  Don’t.  If you need help learning to spell the plural of your own name, just ask.)

Because writing/composition teachers are, in fact, poorly trained, I can understand how being told to put the apostrophe before or after “the S” (which, in point of fact, is sometimes a pluralizing S and sometimes the possessive marker “apostrophe S”) that a reasonably intelligent individual could remain confused about why it is “the people’s choice” and “a grocer’s sign” when so many grocers display the signs of their ignorance so baldly and boldly.

In point of fact, you and every other native speaker of English have been blessed with the intuitive ability to distinguish among “a choice of the people,” “a sign of a typical grocer,” and “the signs of many grocers.”  Once you learn to access what you already know, you will find the apostrophe a trivial problem easily solved.

Expertise in these matters is highly overrated.  Just keep flying by the seat of your pants and you’ll fit right in.

 How about “I can’t tell you the amount of people who have . . .”? Frankly, I’ve come to the point where I simply don’t care about “fewer”/”less,” but when folks use “amount” for “number” like this, I realize I’m not as tolerant as I thought, or perhaps I mean broken down.