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A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

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Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#21

Post by geoelectric »

kerkeslager wrote: post #15

In theory this is a great idea, but not a single implementation I've seen fits my needs. I'm not going to use a writing tool that requires me to change my entire workflow. This (and every other tool I've seen that does something similar[1]) requires me to use their editor. If I want to do something like edit a comment on HN, it requires copy/paste to do that. More crippling than that, these editors don't support anyt…

Do any of this type of tool have an offline version or plugin that would work on Mac? I'd love to use one, but I can't use a web app for confidential information. I'd be happy to install a bundle in vim, Sublime Text, emacs, or whatever.

Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#22

Post by askldfhjkasfhd »

conistonwater wrote: post #10

This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.

I think of it like a code linter; I won't follow every suggestion, but it's nice having another set of "eyes" to point out mistakes.

Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#23

Post by conistonwater »

jlos wrote: post #19
conistonwater wrote: post #10

This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.

The app is correct, both of those phrases are passive. Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition. Semantically, the passive voice involves action being done to the subject. Both those phrases also meet that condition. Rearrange them and you'l see: [1] "I was exhuasted" --> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me". The phrase may not see…

> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me"

I don't think that a correct analysis of the sentence. The exhausted is an adjective, similar to I am tired, but saying "Something tired me" would have a totally different meaning, because it's a different, unrelated sentence. ("I am covered in green paint." also doesn't seem like it's passive voice, but maybe I'm wrong.) As far as I can tell, "our work here is done" is indeed passive voice, but it is also perfectly fine English, and thus must not be highlighted.

"I was exhausted" absolutely does not "lack clarity". What could it possibly be unclear about?

Looking at http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf, I'm also suspicious of your definition of passive (p.7):

> ...passives do not always contain be and do not always contain a past participle. They also do not always obscure the role or responsibility of the doer. They may or may not have a subject (the passive clause in any monument defaced by vandals does not), and they may or may not have a by-phrase (The president has been assassinated does not). Sometimes they specify the agent of an action very clearly (as in It was thrown at them by hooligans), and sometimes not (as in It was thrown at them); sometimes they specify the undergoer (as in A surfer was attacked by a shark) and sometimes not (as in Being attacked by a shark is no fun). Often (as in (3)) there is no action whatsoever, rendering the strange phrase “receives the action” inappropriate.

Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#24

Post by transpy »

I say it is interesting. It's from the same guys from 'Watch a machine-learning system parse the grammatical structure of sentences'. AFAIK, here they are implementing automatic summarization, aided presumably by the accuracy of their parser. I signed up and I look forward to trying it.

Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#26

Post by dragonwriter »

jlos wrote: post #19
conistonwater wrote: post #10

This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.

The app is correct, both of those phrases are passive. Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition. Semantically, the passive voice involves action being done to the subject. Both those phrases also meet that condition. Rearrange them and you'l see: [1] "I was exhuasted" --> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me". The phrase may not see…

> Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition.

Grammatically, the passive voice also places the active participant as an explicit indirect object rather than the subject. A sentence without an explicit indirect object is not in the passive voice.

It may still have some of the same problems of communication which motivate people to work to avoid the use of the passive voice, and may even go further than the actual passive voice in those problems in that rather than deemphasizing the actual actor -- as happens when that moves from subject to object -- it omits the active party entirely. But its still not in the passive voice, despite the similarity in issues that arise.

Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#27

Post by conistonwater »

mwsherman wrote: post #18
conistonwater wrote: post #10

This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.

Passive voice is merely a form of speech. It’s not blanket-wrong. It serves to diminish the actor, which can be a legitimate choice. “He was diagnosed with flu” is passive voice, and appropriate, because the diagnoser is not important. We care more about the flu than the doctor. “Mistakes were made” is evasive and serves to obscure, and should be avoided.

It could also be the case that "mistakes were made" is poor, but without it having anything to do with it being in passive voice. Passive voice also doesn't necessarily "diminish the actor", consider "She was diagnosed by the doctors at X, and the diagnosis was later overturned by a senior doctor.". That's a kind of a blanket claim about passive that's just bound to be wrong when you check it on actual English sentences (I think Pullum's paper I linked to in another comment addresses this well).

Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#28

Post by duaneb »

dragonwriter wrote: post #26
jlos wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The app is correct, both of those phrases are passive. Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition. Semantically, the passive voice involves action being done to the subject. Both those phrases also meet that condition. Rearrange them and you'l see: [1] "I was exhuasted" --> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me". The phrase may not see…

> Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition. Grammatically, the passive voice also places the active participant as an explicit indirect object rather than the subject. A sentence without an explicit indirect object is not in the passive voice. It may still have some of the same problems of communication which motivate pe…

> Grammatically, the passive voice also places the active participant as an explicit indirect object rather than the subject. A sentence without an explicit indirect object is not in the passive voice.

This is not true. Something as simple as "I was sat on" illustrates this well—in English, the subject is still required but the actor is not. This is much MORE so for eg Latin, where verbs take voices with much less context.

"I was exhausted" is ambiguous, using either the imperfect passive voice or the imperfect "to be" with a past participle. However, it's perfectly valid to note as passive as it is, in fact, passive under one of the two interpretations.

Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#29

Post by combatentropy »

Zolomon wrote: post #9

Is there no beauty in painting vivid pictures through colourful expression? Sure, being terse makes consumption faster and easier, but don't you trade that for the tool of directing the reader's imagination? I guess the skill is in being terse yet still descriptive?

The examples in this tool can be misleading, especially if you haven't read the classics like _The Elements of Style_ and _On Writing Well_. Ridding your writing of fluff is central to their teaching, but not at the expense of detail.

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

--- William Strunk Jr., _The Elements of Style_

Instead of quoting them at length, I will let you read them when you have time. The Elements of Style is less than 100 pages, and most of On Writing Well is tied up in the first four chapters.

Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing

#30

Post by stan_rogers »

mwsherman wrote: post #18
conistonwater wrote: post #10

This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.

Passive voice is merely a form of speech. It’s not blanket-wrong. It serves to diminish the actor, which can be a legitimate choice. “He was diagnosed with flu” is passive voice, and appropriate, because the diagnoser is not important. We care more about the flu than the doctor. “Mistakes were made” is evasive and serves to obscure, and should be avoided.

It also manages clean transitions when introducing new actors. The passive voice allows you to put the known at the beginning of a sentence and the new information nearer the end. Without the passive, each individual sentence may be objectively more felicitous, but there is a cognitive disconnection between them.

It might even be worth pointing out that the "authoritative basis" for all of this passive prohibition is an unfortunate misreading of Strunk & White. The Elements of Style merely points out some cringeworthy ways to misuse the passive, and suggests that it shouldn't be your go-to voice.

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