An anonymous informant deep within corporate America ("I work at a large financial institution", he says guardedly) has seen the corporation's style guide for communications with customers, and its advice includes (guess what) this gem of cluelessness: Use active voice rather than passive voice. Active voice is easier to read. Instead of "we have decided," […]
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A commenter named bloix here on Language Log recently pointed out yet another case of passive allegations: First Read, a reliable purveyor of Beltway conventional wisdom, tries out the passive voice: "As for the media, we've allowed this story over race [to] bury one of the more consequential weeks of Obama's presidency thus far (the […]
Doostang is a job-search platform and advice service that, for a fee, will try to help you get a job. It provides on a blog such helpful things as tips on spicing up your resume. And one of the things it suggests is that you should avoid (are you ready for this, Language Log readers?) […]
Charles Krauthammer has joined the chorus of pundits using presidential first-person pronouns to test the theory that a lie told often enough becomes the truth ("The selective modesty of Barack Obama", WaPo, 7/9/2010): It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it […]
I have completed a reanalysis of the verbs in President Obama's speech after the BP oil disaster, and can add a further note to Mark's analysis of Kathleen Parker's unbelievably irresponsible prattle about how the frequency of passive constructions chosen by his speechwriters shows that President Obama talks like a girl (is "suffering a rhetorical-testosterone […]
Following up on my post "Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations" (7/1/2010), Linda Seebach sent a link to a column in which Mark Steyn complained about president Obama's "passivity" ("Obama's lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl", 5/21/2010): Like a lot of guys who've been told they're brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, […]
In her most recent column ("Obama: Our first female president", 7/1/2010), Kathleen Parker argues that Barack Obama writes like a girl: If Bill Clinton was our first black President, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman President. […] No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie President. But … he […]
Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economics professor, maintains a blog for undergraduate economics students. On it, back in 2006, he placed a guide to good economics writing. And I fear that you may already have guessed what, with sinking heart, I correctly foresaw that I would find therein.
Language is changing at a torrid pace in China, and it's not just a massive infusion of English words that is to blame. Nor can we simply ascribe the dramatic changes in language usage to rampant, wild punning for the purpose of confusing the ubiquitous censors. Creative manipulation of lexical and grammatical constructions is another […]
Yesterday's Dinosaur Comics explores the far reaches of verbal morphosyntax in English: (As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)
Anita Krishnakumar posts at Concurring Opinions on November 2 about a Supreme Court judgment by Justice Anthony Kennedy that turned quite crucially on the distinction between active and passive voice in the language of criminal statutes, only (you're ahead of me already aren't you, Language Log readers?) Justice Kennedy doesn't know his passive from a […]
The widely-watched PBS documentary The Civil War included this commentary by Shelby Foote: Before the war, it was said "the United States are." Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always "the United States is," as we say today without being […]
Another opinion piece for our passive voice file: Marie Murray, "The passive voice is the penultimate weapon of denial", The Irish Times, 7/31/2009: The passive voice is especially useful where apologies are required: personal apologies for what people have done personally. Because instead of having to say, “I’m sorry”, the passive voice allows a culprit […]