"There is no such writing rule"
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Today's Dinosaur Comics:
Mouseover title: "hello, yes, I believe it is inarguable that you'll remember data and riker's cheeky bottoms more than you'll remember alice and bob and dick and jane"
Archive page note: "see it's justified because star trek ITSELF has been known to boldly go in favour of splitting infinitives in opening narrations. q.e.d., nerds"
[h/t John Berenberg]
Update — a couple of our many earlier posts on why the passive voice is not evil or even a problem:
"When men were men, and verbs were passive", 8/4/2006
"How to defend yourself from bad advice about writing", 11/1/2006
Laura Morland said,
May 12, 2020 @ 2:52 pm
Very cute, and I agree, of course, with Non-Rules #1 and #2. As a former writing instructor, I would caution that only those who have mastered the art of writing should avoid Non-Rule #3.
On the other side of the coin, a friend once published a book (before I knew her) where she described 6 months of piloting through the canals of England entirely in the passive voice!
She had, apparently, over-extrapolated the 'rule' that one shouldn't use the first-person pronoun in an essay. Her book would have been unreadable if it wasn't so amusing.
Ambarish Sridharanarayanan said,
May 12, 2020 @ 2:57 pm
> where she described 6 months of piloting through the canals of England entirely in the passive voice!
Oh my, I'd find that unreadable too! Just as I'd find a description of 6 months of piloting through the canals of England entirely in the active voice.
Which is why "Never use the passive voice unless you've mastered the act of writing" sounds suspect to me.
Eric Nelson said,
May 12, 2020 @ 3:11 pm
A former colleague told me this story of a time when she was teaching about the passive voice in a class for teacher trainees, most of whom were native speakers of English. Trying to understand why her students found the passive voice so difficult to grasp asked, "Why is this so hard?"
Someone answered, "Because it isn't used!"
Julian said,
May 12, 2020 @ 5:28 pm
Passives: the train-spotter magazine that I used to get often has articles sent in by readers. 'Our weekend in the country finding freight train photo ops.' These articles have a very distinctive stodgy, over-formal style. 'A hearty breakfast was partaken of in the hotel dining room and soon we were on our way.' It's the style of unconfident amateur writers who lean too formal because they're afraid of saying something wrong. It's like listening to a not-very-skilful child busker – so focused on getting their fingers on the right notes that they're not thinking about making music.
Anthony said,
May 12, 2020 @ 8:17 pm
The speaking style of American policemen is similarly stodgy, when they are addressing the press or the court. (When addressing the populace, not so much.)
Orbeiter said,
May 12, 2020 @ 8:27 pm
I'm a little disappointed that the author didn't, erm, touch on double superlatives.
Shakespeare used them ("the most unkindest cut of all") yet they are more likely than the examples given to be regarded as a definite error by most people.
Data's was the most eagerest bum Riker had ever patted.
John Shutt said,
May 12, 2020 @ 8:38 pm
I've got a translation of the Morte Darthur around here somewhere with (iirc) an introduction that talks about the artistic use of piled-on synonyms in Middle English. Alas and alack. Verily and forsooth.
Martha said,
May 12, 2020 @ 9:30 pm
Orbeiter – The reason double superlatives weren't included is because, as you mentioned, most people consider them a definite error. That makes avoiding them a rule, not a non-rule. Just like not saying "dogses." The non-rules are things high school English teachers told us not to do in our essays but which are otherwise completely grammatical and unremarkable, and actually often preferable. (And as far as Shakespeare is concerned, there are a lot of things people said 500 years ago that we don't say now.)
Regarding double negatives, the example in the cartoon wasn't the kind of double negative I was taught was bad. We were always taught about things like "Riker didn't touch no butt" (vs. "Riker didn't touch a butt") but not things like "Riker didn't not touch a butt" (which can't really be replaced with anything).
Jenny Chu said,
May 12, 2020 @ 10:22 pm
@John Shutt is that where "eftsoons and right speedily" comes from? I have been reading P.G. Wodehouse recently and Bertie quotes it often.
John Shutt said,
May 12, 2020 @ 11:40 pm
@Jenny Chu The phrase has a certain elegance (and also sounds like Bertie). Not readily finding a clear explanation of it (just scattered examples), but looks as if "eftsoons and right speedily" may be a standard phrase used in some sort of legal context. Though it needn't be one or the other, as I'd think some of those old legal phrases would have their roots close to Middle English.
Michael Watts said,
May 12, 2020 @ 11:56 pm
Like Martha, it bothered me that the illustration of "double negatives are bad" in the comic is not an example of a double negative. It's two single negatives, exactly as the "writing rule" people would want.
rosie said,
May 13, 2020 @ 12:35 am
Whenever the "double negatives are bad" notion comes up, it is bothersome because of the high risk that the author will equivocate on what "double negative" means. In this case, "didn't" governs a predicate whose verb is negated, so this is indeed a double negative. Doesn't mean double negatives are good, though. Doesn't mean double negatives are bad, either. Some are good, some are bad.
Andreas Johansson said,
May 13, 2020 @ 1:22 am
I also thought the double negative example was weird.
As a native speaker of a grammatically rather similar language where nobody AFAIK has ever taught kids to avoid the passive voice, I find the widespread aversion to it among anglophones utterly baffling.
Graeme said,
May 13, 2020 @ 5:56 am
The double negative 'example' sounds less flirtish than legalistic.
AntC said,
May 13, 2020 @ 6:45 am
passive voice, I find the widespread aversion to it among anglophones utterly baffling.
No, the aversion is not 'widespread' amongst English speakers; only amongst Americans. I went to a British grammar school; and although we were told a-plenty not to split no infinitives, I didn't even find out what the passive was until I studied Latin. In fact the Chemistry master encouraged use of that 'stodgy train-spotter' style for writing up experiments — as if flasks got heated by magic and solutions were observed to turn blue by the evil eye.
Apparently to claim the solution turned blue without observation was too metaphysical (the tree that falls in the forest); to confess to being the observer made the whole exercise subjective. What I learned was all about the small-mindedness of Chemistry teachers; and nothing about Chemistry.
Oh, and BTW whereas Latin has a 'passive voice'; English is not Latin so doesn't — it has a passive construct/passive is shown in the arrangement of the clause, not just/not even the verb form. See Pullum's many articles.
RKD said,
May 13, 2020 @ 9:39 am
I have always thought avoiding the passive voice had to do with trying to be clear about agency. In other words, saying "the bum was patted" completely bypasses who did the patting. The clearest writing, then, would tend toward the active voice so you never had a question about who was doing what. Or at least, that's what I divined from my grammar lessons. Of course, that means using the passive voice can be a very handy way to write about a matter without having to name names, so to speak.
Philip Taylor said,
May 13, 2020 @ 9:42 am
Very much in line with AntC here, although in my case the chemistry master did use the phrase "passive voice" when explaining how a laboratory report should be written. The idea, as I understood it 45 years ago and as I continue to understand it today, was to separate the rôle of the experimenter from the description of the experiment, because the essence of science is repeatibility — were I to write "I heated the reagent to 75℃", another experimenter could not repeat this because he or she would not be me. If, however, I wrote "the reagent was heated to 75℃", then another experimenter could repeat the process exactly as described.
Richard Hershberger said,
May 13, 2020 @ 9:53 am
"I would caution that only those who have mastered the art of writing should avoid Non-Rule #3."
This advice is, as has been pointed out suspect. Even taking it at face value, it is teaching how to produce mediocre writing. Does anyone teach an advanced class, in how to use the passive? I have never heard of such a thing. But to be blunt, there is no reason to take this advice at face value. It is a fallback in the face of the reality that good writers use the passive routinely. It does not deign to analyze why these uses are good, and exceptions to the general case. The advice is merely a throwing up of the hands, declaring the good passive an unfathomable mystery. If the premise were true, surely these miraculous good passives would be subject to study–and eager study at that.
The advice is, upon further examination, even worse than that. Everyone uses the passive voice routinely and frequently. Furthermore, the vast majority of the time, these casual uses are the same whether by one of the immortals who have received their Passive Voice License, or by ordinary schlubs. Furthermost, any serious attempt to entirely avoid the passive voice would be disastrous. This does not happen in practice only because most people attempting to follow this advice have only a vague notion of what the passive voice is, and even those few who do use it naturally, when they aren't specifically conscious of it.
The pity is that there really are bad uses of the passive voice. A serious analysis of what makes a use bad and how to avoid it would be genuinely useful. Instead we get a lazy generalization.
John Shutt said,
May 13, 2020 @ 10:19 am
Passive voice is discouraged in news writing (at least, the sort of news writing we do at Wikinews). This shouldn't be surprising, but seems worth saying here; I'm fascinated by the very plausible suggestion that in some scientific writing it would actually be encouraged. Clearly it's a tool that should be far more heavily used in some tasks than others. Our advice on Wikinews is that, one, active voice makes for punchier sentences (punch matters, in news; Arthur Brisbane advised, "Never forget that if you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one"), and, two, passive voice allows omission of the actor, and in news reportage we don't want to omit the actor ("who" is one of the five Ws).
Philip Taylor said,
May 13, 2020 @ 12:07 pm
"Passive voice is discourated in news writing" — hmmm, looks very much like the passive voice to me. And how would you recommend re-casting the following ?
Something along the lines of "We at Wikinews consider this page as a guideline. Editors widely accept it, and consider it a standard that all users should follow. However, he or she who cast it cast it not in stone, and therefore Wikinews users should treat it with commonsense and expect occasional exceptions.", perhaps ?
J.W. Brewer said,
May 13, 2020 @ 12:47 pm
What I found most surprising about this cartoon was how it challenged my default assumption that dinosaurs talking about Star Trek would be doing so in AmEng, in which no one would use the foreignism "bum" to refer to the body part in question. Shame on me for not having previously considered that dinosaurs talking about Star Trek might to the contrary be BrEng speakers.
Peter Erwin said,
May 13, 2020 @ 2:32 pm
@ Philip Johnson:
were I to write "I heated the reagent to 75℃", another experimenter could not repeat this because he or she would not be me. If, however, I wrote "the reagent was heated to 75℃", then another experimenter could repeat the process exactly as described.
Speaking as a scientist, that is a delightfully silly and nonsensical justification. (No remotely sane scientist would be so inhumanly literal-minded think the first sentence would prevent replication.)
Peter Erwin said,
May 13, 2020 @ 2:34 pm
Sorry, my previous comment should have been addressed to Philip Taylor…
AntC said,
May 13, 2020 @ 4:46 pm
Does anyone teach an advanced class, in how to use the passive? …, surely these miraculous good passives would be subject to study–and eager study at that.
Famously, Strunk & White can't tell a passive (let alone a 'good' passive) from a dinosaur's bum — most of the examples they condemn are not at all passives. CGEL has an 'advanced class'; but briefly: the purpose of a passive might be to delete the agent (where it is not relevant to the action), but is equally likely to be to move the agent later in the sentence so it gets focus. And Wikinews's guide should be saying that. What school English didn't teach me was the topic-comment/given-new sequence of English, thus:
I saw the fluid turn blue; the subsequent explosion that shattered the flask into a million pieces was seen by the whole class.
Presumably English teachers regard sequence-of-ideas as not grammar but stylistics; just as in Latin, which has much freer word order thanks to inflections showing the grammar. Stylistics in Latin is teachable, but not until after you've mastered the darn inflections.
Michael Watts said,
May 13, 2020 @ 10:58 pm
While I agree that this looks like the passive voice, I think there is a stronger case to be made that it's actually just ordinary be+adjective, not passive be+participle.
anonymouse said,
May 14, 2020 @ 1:23 am
I am sick of telling my college biology students that they can use "I" and "we" in formal scientific writing. Somehow a lot of them absorbed the silly "no first person" rule somewhere. Then I ask them to go back and look over the professionally published journal articles they've been reading all term and see if those use first person. It turns out they all do. Then the students feel sheepish that they hadn't noticed that all these articles were violating this fake "rule" left and right…
Philip Taylor said,
May 14, 2020 @ 2:56 am
Michael, I lack the background necessary to know for certain whether "Passive voice is discoura[g]ed in news writing" is itself cast in the passive voice or is, as you suggest, "ordinary be+adjective", but I do believe that "Passive voice is discoura[g]ed in news writing" and "The reagent was heated to 75℃" are in 1:1 correspondence and therefore whichever analysis applies to the latter must surely apply equally to the former.
David Morris said,
May 14, 2020 @ 7:22 am
Passive voice requires transitive verbs, so writing a book entirely in passive voice requires not using intransitive verbs, including the most common verb in English, BE. Also, a book based on one's personal experience is hardly an essay, so surely the advice against the first-person pronoun wouldn't have applied.
I went through school as explicit instruction in grammar was being phased out, so I didn't hear these 'rules' until a long time after.
John Shutt said,
May 14, 2020 @ 7:47 am
(1) I'm unsure why it's worthy of remark that my comment on news writing uses passive voice, or that the Wikinews guideline page does so. As criticism it would miss the mark, since the recommendation is about active voice in news articles, and neither of those texts is in a news article. However, my intended point was that different contexts may genuinely call for different attitudes toward voicing, and the use of passive voice in these texts about news writing is admittedly a case thereof.
(2) Quibbling over the precise meaning of the term "passive voice" would be frowned upon at Wikinews, That sort of thing is a Wikipedian cultural trait, rather than Wikinewsie. The how-many-fairies-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin effect is common to most such not-a-writing-rules.
(3) What does matter is the practical effect, hence in this case the mention of underlying concerns: news writing should be punchy, and should in most sentences specify the actor.
A major (the major?) functional purpose of shifting voice is to permute the order of nouns in a sentence; and in objective news reporting (to which Wikinews aspires), the permutation we're mostly after is to put the actor at the front of the sentence.
A principle Wikipedia and Wikinews more-or-less share (with, as usual, some nuanced differences), is IAR = "Ignore All Rules", which says that, up to a point, rules should be subordinated to common sense. There's a mock-koan I rather like on Wikipedia page WP:ZEN: ", saying (in one version, as it's a wiki page and therefore fluid), "The use of IAR which is noticed is not the true IAR."
Jon W said,
May 15, 2020 @ 9:21 am
@JW Brewer: Since Ryan North grew up and lives in Ontario, it's fair to assume that the dinosaurs speak CanE (in which I gather that folks do use "bum" to refer to that body part).
Monscampus said,
May 16, 2020 @ 7:57 pm
@John Shutt
Verily and forsooth… Isn't that simply a hendiadys?
Michael Watts said,
May 16, 2020 @ 9:09 pm
I'm saying I don't think they are. Why are you sure of this?
John Shutt said,
May 16, 2020 @ 10:34 pm
@Monscampus
It's my impression the term "hendiadys" wouldn't typically be applied when the two terms are synonyms. So it seems to me like a different phenomenon (which would also be consistent with the translator finding it worthy of remark).
Philip Taylor said,
May 17, 2020 @ 2:08 am
Michael — I did not say I was sure; I said "I do believe", which is a rather different thing. in my mind, at least. There are very few things about which I am sure, very many that I believe to be true, and a not insignificant fraction about which I simply don't know.
But maybe I misunderstand your questions, and you are asking why I wrote "must surely apply". In which case I would re-cast everything from " 1:1 corespondence and therefore" onwards as follows : "1:1 correspondence. If this is indeed the case, then whichever analysis applies to the latter must surely apply equally to the former". Does that seem a more reasonable position to you ?
Michael Watts said,
May 17, 2020 @ 3:15 am
Yes, I agree that if they were two examples of the same construction, then whatever you could say about the one construction would apply to the other (identical) construction. But I see no reason to believe that "The passive voice is discouraged in news writing" and "The reagent was heated to 75 degrees" are syntactically analogous to each other. I think the stronger argument is that discouraged has developed into an adjective in that sense. This would make "The passive voice is discouraged in news writing" syntactically analogous to "Black hair is common in China".
I will cheat a very little bit by presenting an example using a different sense of the word "discouraged":
1. He appeared to be discouraged.
2. He demanded to be heard.
In (2), "to be heard" is a passive infinitive verb. It is possible to interpret (1) the same way, if his purpose in appearing was to allow someone else to discourage him. But that would be very unusual; it's much more likely that "discouraged" is a description being predicated of him.
Philip Taylor said,
May 17, 2020 @ 4:21 am
OK, understood Michael. Now rather tied up with other matters, may comment further in due course if comments still open by then.
Andrew Usher said,
May 17, 2020 @ 5:21 pm
Michael Watts:
Your example shows that that other sense of 'discouraged' behaves as an adjective. But that only strengthens the case that the sense being talked about was not: 'the passive voice is discourages in news writing' is exactly equivalent to 'they discourage the passive voice is news writing' (for the appropriate value of 'they') and that is the very definition of a passive.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
J said,
May 19, 2020 @ 9:56 am
Laura Morland said,
a friend once published a book (before I knew her) where she described 6 months of piloting through the canals of England entirely in the passive voice
which I gardenparsed as
a friend once published a book (before I knew her) where she described 6 months of {piloting through the canals of England entirely in the passive voice}