Passive Voice and other writing stuffs

[Curious]

I asked a question in the Lori Alexander thread about passive voice and got some great responses that really helped me finally understand what that means.

@older than allosaurs continued the topic in more depth, but didn't want to derail the Lori thread.   I want to hear more so I'm starting this thread

[clueliss]

Thank you for starting a new subject.  Lori scares me and I typically don't read there.  I do, however, snark on passive voice in the Raquel thread(s).

[laPapessaGiovanna]

On 10/4/2016 at 9:43 PM, EyeQueue said:

When I was studying Latin for about 3 years during my undergrad and into my grad work, I noticed that a lot of my prose was in passive voice because Latin just loves it. So I had to really proofread my stuff to get back to the active.

Quoting from Lori's thread. 

This is so true. And ancient Greek is even worse, in fact it even has a "mediopassivo" voice (no idea how it's called in English) that has some characteristics of the active and some of the passive and varies a lot accordingly to the verb.

Fun fact: I often noticed that people teased some fundies for writing with a "passive voice" (here we call it "passive form of the verb"). In my naivety I thought it was a reference to passive aggressiveness . I sensed though the maybe I was missing something but I never put my finger on exactly what. 

Guess my surprise when you all were talking about grammar . In Italian passive voice is used a lot and it's no big deal. If I try to translate in English a sentence that I have formulated in Italian I often end up in trouble thanks to how horribly redundant passive voice sounds in your language. Mostentimes I just give up and reformulate trying to think it directly in English. 

I think that this is connected to another big difference: the need to always specify the subject in English. We don't need to do it as often in Italian. For example:

I went to the shopping mall.

Andai al centro commerciale.

In English I had to specify that "I" did it, no need to say "io" in Italian because the verb makes it obvious. It makes literal translations sound awful. 

Back to fundies and their abuse of passive voice. NT was originally written in ancient Greek and KJV is an English translation of the Vulgata, the latin version of the NT. I've never read KJV nor I intend to do it anytime soon. But maybe you can tell me if the passive voice is used with increased frequency in it, maybe as an "inheritance" from greek and latin. And we all know how our fundies love and admire KJV.

[EyeQueue]

Another fun construction is nominalization. Like the passive voice, if it's overused it can lead to your writing being flat, lifeless, and hella wordy.

Nominalization is when you take an active verb and turn it into a lifeless noun in a sentence. So:

The State Department conducted thorough investigation of the violence in Basra.

To fix this, you identify where the nominalization is, and (as I tell my students) verb that noun. Change it back into an active verb and--if necessary--assign an agent.

The fix for this example is pretty straightforward (it's not an egregious example).  Walla (and yes--I am using that in the fundiespeak way):

The State Department thoroughly investigated the violence in Basra.

Nominalization can get pretty horrible pretty quickly. Check it out:

A significant contribution to the literature on the subject is Davidson's specification of the causes for relaxation of enforcement standards by courts appointed during the Reagan and Bush years.

That's an example of needing to identify an agent when you verb the first noun (contributes). I would fix this in this way (but there are other possibilities):

Davidson significantly contributes to the literature on the subject by specifying why courts appointed during the Reagan and Bush years relaxed enforcement standards.

My students had lots of fun with this when we went over it in my undergrad English Grammar class last year.

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

I had an English teacher in high school who worked very hard to keep his students from using passive voice. Since passive voice uses "to be" verbs, he would mark any "to be" verbs in our papers unless we made a note in the margin that we had used the verb intentionally. (be, am, are, is, was, were, being, been)

I always wanted to quote Hamlet to him.

"To be, or not to be

That is the question."

[clueliss]

I used passive voice a lot until I started a job in the mid-90s (mind you, I'm an accountant) and had a boss that drove passive voice out of his employees.  Learning to write fiction also aided the effort.

http://woodwardpress.com/2016/04/04/the-case-of-the-copula-overdose/

I came across the above in a Facebook post recently and posted in it the Raquel thread.  Going to repost here because it discusses and illustrated 'was' overusage.

[sockinshoe]

I actually speak in the passive voice a great deal. Although, since my favourite prof has started a one-woman campaign to cure me of my passive language, I have improved. A feature that saves me life on the regular is the word "readibility stats" check. It tells you approximately what grade level you're writing for (I aim at 12.0-14.0 usually) and what percentage of your sentences are passive (I try to keep below 5%, but I usually end up around 8-10%). 

I do have a few grammar rules I use constantly: I hate ending sentences with prepositions; I know my who/whom distinction; and I almost never conflate fewer/less and well/good. But that's because my dad was a speechwriter who drummed into me that you had to know the rules to break them for the sake of folksiness, etc.

[EyeQueue]

On 4/20/2016 at 11:37 AM, sockinshoe said:

I actually speak in the passive voice a great deal. Although, since my favourite prof has started a one-woman campaign to cure me of my passive language, I have improved. A feature that saves me life on the regular is the word "readibility stats" check. It tells you approximately what grade level you're writing for (I aim at 12.0-14.0 usually) and what percentage of your sentences are passive (I try to keep below 5%, but I usually end up around 8-10%). 

I do have a few grammar rules I use constantly: I hate ending sentences with prepositions; I know my who/whom distinction; and I almost never conflate fewer/less and well/good. But that's because my dad was a speechwriter who drummed into me that you had to know the rules to break them for the sake of folksiness, etc.

When grading English essays, prepositions at the end of sentences is something up with which I will not put.