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Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?
From: |
Uday Reddy |
Subject: |
Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice? |
Date: |
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:30:46 -0000 |
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On 10/3/2010 4:06 AM, Xah Lee wrote:
The Language Log recently has a blog asking readers to identify
passive/active voice. (Apparantly, they've been beating this horse for
a while, but i only started to read Language Log last month.) Before i
tackle the question and post my redoubtable comment with implicit
offense at grammarians, i thought to myself: it's been some 17 years
when i read anything technical about passive/active voice in Struck&
White... so let me look into Wikipedia to refresh myself just so i
won't come out a fool.
Gosh, for a while there, I thought Emacs had begun to complain about passive
voice. Heaven forbid!
* 〈50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice〉 (2009-04-17) By Geoffrey K
Pullum. The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32): B15. chronicle.com
Quote:
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in
which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from
limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has
not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has
significantly degraded it.
...
What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being
retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they
don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four
pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to
correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses.
“At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is correctly
identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all
errors: ...
Pretty damning — or it would be if Strunk and White had actually claimed any of
those were passive constructions. They don’t. Here’s how they introduce these
examples: “Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively
and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such
perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.” (My link is to the
online text of the Strunk-only 1918 edition, but the passage is unchanged in
later editions.)
Now, Strunk and White themselves use the passive voice in that sentence, so one
might say they are violating their own rules (though they’re not — they don’t
say the passive may never be used, only that active constructions tend to be
more forceful). But they don’t claim that their examples are all in the passive
voice. Excessive deployment of the passive is only one of the weaknesses they
discuss in this section. Their point is not only to urge the use of the active
voice but to encourage the use of “active” transitive verbs rather than limp
declarations of being. It’s sound advice: “dead leaves covered the ground”
really is more forceful and better than “there were a great number of dead
leaves lying on the ground.”
One can fairly complain that Strunk and White perceive the threat to good style
as coming from only one direction. Consider their next section, in which they
command, “Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating,
non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis,
never as a means of evasion.” “Denial,” “evasion,” “colorless” — these are
tendentious terms. Someone who takes the authors’ advice too literally will
always write fortissimo, without any understanding of the uses and virtues of
the pianissimo. Irony, impartiality, subtlety, and negation do have a place in
good writing. And bad prose can be Stentorian just as it can be anodyne, though
admittedly most writers, especially in academia, err on the mushy side.
-- The Elements of Bad Style?
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy
http://www.amconmag.com/mccarthy/2009/04/26/the-elements-of-bad-style/
I have no idea why the linguists have begun to stab each other. But it looks
like a good idea for Computer Scientists to stay out of it.
Cheers,
Uday
- emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Xah Lee, 2010/12/08
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?,
Uday Reddy <=
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Alan Mackenzie, 2010/12/08
- RE: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Drew Adams, 2010/12/09
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Sean Sieger, 2010/12/09
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, ken, 2010/12/10
- Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?, Russ P., 2010/12/09