March 29, 2004

• good find, f8x!
• Thanks boo! I'm always on the lookout for good writing tools.
• I try to watch out for passive voice because my English teacher -- who has taken A Healthy Interest in my education -- raked me over the coals for a single passive sentence. I'll diddle with the algorithm; maybe I can put it into OO.o
• Passive sentences, like any form are perfectly fine when they are used well. My sentences are written with a concious consideration of what I want to emphasise, the object or the subject. If the object is the most important thing, then I place it in the grammatical "subject" position. This anti-passive movement is simply unbased prejudice, along the lines that would like to strip "to boldly go" from our language in favour of the insipid "to go boldly." [good link, please don't take anti-anti-passive bitterness personally]
• Oops - forgot a comma in the first sentence. (I hate making typos or grammatical mistakes in discussions on grammar - it really sticks out - even if the internet is an informal environment where my predilection for dash abuse is kindly ignored).
• What's so wrong about passive tenses? I don't get it.
• It's not that they're wrong, it's that more than half of my english class wrote solely in the passive voice, and so much passivity makes for dull, weak writing. You can use the passive voice, just as you can use a sentence fragment as a device, but know why you're employing these rhetorical tools.
• 'The cat was bitten by a dog.' - passive voice. 'A dog bit the cat.' - active voice. Why is the passive one bad but the active one good? They both read pretty much the same to me.
• That's a very good way to put it, boo - it's a rhetorical device. Like the Genesis device, it is a powerful weapon that can be used to create or to destroy. Sorry, watched Star Trek I and II back to back on Sat for the first time in years - and they seem to have infected everything I think about. I promise to stop before I start shouting "Kh..."
• p.s. jb : I encourage you to keep up the good fight. A quotation to inspire you : Do not go quietly into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light!" - Dylan Thomas
• i turned off the "passive voice" filter in my copy of office. when you do scientific writing, you are very often entirely passive. if not, the editors don't like it. active voice is for business meetings (along with meaningless buzzwords like "proactive") and for writing novels that are meant to entertain. passive is pretty much the norm for all the papers i read and/or try to get published. (but try and get MS word to recognize that...) personally i rage against the dying of the light by pointing out when words are misused. i particularly dislike the incorrect use of "decimate" by people who should know better. killing one in ten (the definition of the word) is not the same as laying waste to or annihilation of the opposition. if you mean annihilate, then by all means use that word. if you mean a 10% reduction, decimate away.
• frogs, my peeves: 1) the use of literally as an intensifier, e.g., I was so angry that I literally wanted to rip my head off; 2) the use of unique to mean special, e.g. The vibrating cupholders make this car extremely unique.
• Or the use of ironic to mean coincidental...
• My next tale will be written purely in the passive voice... If it ever comes to be written.
• I loathe the passive voice in business writing and political speech because it is frequently used to obscure responsibility and agency. "The decision was made to end this programme". "Steps were taken to prevent future reocurrences". "The coffee machine was removed". I reflexively retort "by whom?!" whenever I hear such evasive talk.
• Ooh, and the only actual passive in the passage given as an example is "the children had been burned". So I'm not that impressed. Really, what this script does is detect forms of "to be". This is still an achievement, but I don't see it as a useful aid to good style.
• Most of my writing is in the passive voice. The rule that you should not write in it is just another one of the many grammar rules that have been over enforced. There is a place for the active voice and a place for the passive voice. To say that the passive voice is not the correct form only limits the expression of the writer.
• for the new turn the thread's taking : Junk English helps people recognize these lingual atrocities.
• dng: Passive voice can get a bad name because people try to hide behind it - "And when the command was entered, the company's database was erased" as opposed to, "when I entered the command, I erased the company's database." As others have noted, passive voice is generally considered a must in scientific writing, where the author is trying to present what happened in a more objective, detached fashion. Which is most appropriate depends on context, which is why crapulent nonsese like Word's appallingly bad, 19th Century Latin weenie inspired grammar filters bug the living shit out of me. The Latin weenies are also responsible for nonsensical claims about split inifinitives and so on; the idea behind such absurdities is largely as a result of 19th century dimwits who, having decided Latin is the perfect language, which it isn't, set about trying to enslave English to its rules. A pox on them and their modern day descendants.
• Mistakes were made.
• Cheers, rodgerd. I hate having to write all my reports for university in an impersonal, objective voice. I think its unhelpful, actually, especially when I'm explaining design decisions, or something similar. To be able to say I decided to instead of The decision was made to... (I turned Word's grammer filter off long ago. I'd forgotten how irritating, and nonsensical, that fucker was)
• My favourite peeve from the Wonderful World of Business is when some weasel announces: "There is an expectation," therefore you all have to work 60 hours per week to make something happen. Really? Who has this expectation, exactly? May I speak with them to correct it? How did this expectation arise? Who has been telling lie to whom?
• Wolof: you are Binky's one-eared son Bongo, and I claim my two-for-one pass at Akbar and Jeff's Tofu Hut.
• dng - i think i come here to engage in the desire to write things in first-person active voice. it's nice for a change... anyway, it seems easier to make things succinct in active voice. it's hard to do so passively. which is probably why i write in passive voice so much. i do so like to hear the sound of my own passive voice...
• The concept of grammar is often overemphasized. I find that trying to write without any passive sentences at all can result in hours of restructuring. My concern is not where the subject or object is in the sentence, but with the sentence as a whole
• goetter, I have a bad habit of saying "literally" that I am aware of and trying hard to curb. Most often "literally" for me means "...was so tempted to..." Doing a social sciences degree, I learned quickly that passive sentences are The Devil according to TAs. So is (another of my bad habits) using "This is..." to begin a sentence or paragraph. You should avoid all uses of "this is", "this means", or, indeed, "this $thing" completely and, instead, detail the thing that your "this" describes. Avoiding passive voice and "this" in my essays probably made them sound more intelligent than anything I had written to that point.
• Is it worth me putting on my 19th century pedant hat? When we modify a verb to convey some additional sense, this is called "conjugation". English has crappy boring verbs that hardly change much at all when you conjugate them; in fact they've grown so weak they need help from highly-paid auxiliaries like "to be" and "to have". "Tense" denotes references to time; past, present, or future. In English we need "shall" or will" (or in these deplorable times, " 'm gonna") to indicate the future tense. Many languages just don't find the future tense necessary at all, so in German you can say "I see you tomorrow, yes?" "Voice" changes according to whether the verb's subject is being acted upon. English these days only expresses this with the aid of the verb "to be", thus: "I munted Rodger's database" - active "Rodger's database was munted by me" - passive. Constructions such as "It rained", or "There was a decision to..." are termed "impersonal". Then there's "mood", which indicates the probability of something happening, our degree of belief in it, or our desire for it to happen. English lost these along with the colonies, but traces of the subjunctive mood survive for reported speech and things that are counterfactual: "If only I were more knowledgable about the subjective". Finally, there's aspect: whether actions are discrete or continuous. Thus things can be indicative, perfect, and other words I can't remember just now. Languagehat can tell you all about the aorist in Ancient Greek. English arguably has aspect in constructions with "to be" + "-ing", thus: "I am writing" vs "I write". Fitting verbs into rigid paradigms is hard, because they're squishy, wriggly things, and you can google for a description of the ergative in Basque, and you realise that we're really jolly lucky to have such simple conjugations in English. If you master all this, eventually you will realise that: "If only that had been known to me" is the pluperfect passive subjunctive.
• Had been made known to me, damnit.
• Andr
• vital: One of my impressions that I have been left with after reading McWhorter's (rather good) The Tower of Babel is that languages tend to end up with many formal rote-learned structures around gender or conjugation (Latin, many African languages) or little formal structure and bags and bags that have to be inferred from context.
• Pardon me for being obsessive, but I forgot the imperative mood.
• Vnz
• Bloody Hell! First, a post from ftrain that was understandable -- useful, even. Secondly, another reason to move over to Mozilla. Thirdly, no active verbs were damaged in the writing of this comment. Bloody amazing, I tell you. (Shit!)
• languages tend to end up with many formal rote-learned structures around gender or conjugation Different languages signify in different ways by the use of different parts of speech in different orders in different parts of the sentence. It is easy in the synchronic sense to qualify these signifiers as abritarily determined. It is far more interesting, in my view, to draw out the diachronic aspects of *why* these relationships are considered as arbitrary than any amount of wittering in the service of the construction of the case for the contrary. Because what was once a revolutionary move is now a conservative one. Case in point? The word "text".
• to qualify these signifiers It would have been neater to say "the order of these signifiers", but word order is itself a signifier. /thinking out loud
• niccolo - i tend to type in all lower-case. i understand that it may be hard for you to read. i know for a fact that all-caps is insanely hard to read, due to the lack of descenders, etc. that we subconsciously use to recognize words, but aside from not being able to distinctly see the beginning or end of a sentence due to missing initial caps, how much harder is it to read all lower-case than standard text? this is after all written in english; we don't have nearly as many proper nouns requiring capitalization as, say, german. i suppose i do lower-case out of friendliness - just as all-caps is the 'net equivalent of shouting, i assume standard capitalization to be more formal, and lower-case to be informal and friendly. i use proper capitalization when composing email to people i don't know well, or for business. i do however try to make a point to punctuate and spell properly. i have been known to mangle a word or use a colloquial abbreviation for effect, but (even when sending a text message by phone) i generally try not to condense words, and refuse to use "u" or "ur" to mean "you" or "your", and so forth. it smacks of juvenile laziness. tracicle - that is, among other things, the difference between social sciences and physical sciences. sociology may demand action, but we science geeks like our writing to be vague and passive. that way when attacked in a rebuttal, one can simply deflect the blame to a co-author, as it isn't clear in the writing which author was responsible for executing each specific portion of the experiment in question. (of course i am joking. all the blame goes to the first author, as does the glory.) and vitalorgnz - i still maintain that the rules laid out for grammar and the names of the different bits of a properly constructed sentence are inflicted upon us in primary school for one reason only: so that we can help our own children when it's their turn to suffer this affliction.
• live frogs: All lower case in much harder to read for me. I like the visual markers caps provide. Otherwise it's like trying to make head or tail of medieval manuscripts.
• Ugh, any of you have tried to read a mathematical paper or a treatise on pure logic? It's all exact and such, but it's a pain in the ass (at least for me) to follow the ever increasing symbolic abstractions. The added passivity in language makes them even more duller and numbling. Worst than all, everything must be explained through references to other papers that could use different writing conventions. One of the many reasons I never pursued a Ph.D. /OT
• clf, I am so with you on the text-message thing. I also can't stand the word "text" as a verb, mostly because "I texted you" is so hard to say. My dad is the worst offender -- I regularly receive messages from him saying, "hi c u l8r k". Argh! That is what predictive text is for, people!!
• I've never owned a mobile phone. Or used one. I don't know whether to feel special or left out.
• well, dng, i moved to mobile because i realized that all i used my landline for was to dial up to the 'net and receive telemarketer solicitations. got a cable modem and a mobile phone, and suddenly my downloads are faster and i can eat dinner in peace (although you have to be pretty militant in not giving out your number to keep it this way). i send text messages to my sister since she doesn't have email, and it's cheaper for her to receive a message than it is for her to answer a call on her prepaid phone. other than that i don't use the message feature. prior to this i was pretty anti-cellular. i still don't feel the need to be on the phone 24-7 just because i can. between my wife and i, we don't go over 300 minutes a month...
• I buy prepaid because I rarely use my phone except to receive text messages from my family who are avid texters. It takes me three months to go through $20. Go me!
• Over here, we have some national obssession with acronyms. So instead of 'text', we use 'sms', for "short message system". You hear people (including me) say "I sms-ed her", or "try sms-ing him". We pronounce it as individual letters.