I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
When you become older, everything fits this pattern, which makes day to day living tiresome.
A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#32Earlier 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" --> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me". The phrase may not see…
> "${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 voi…
Thanks for the article, I'll give it a read later today.
I'll try to add some clarity to what I said (because passive voice isn't the only way to muddy the linguistic waters).
A passive voice doesn't make the sentence bad and often the passive voice does constitute perfectly fine English. When saying, "I was exhuasted" I may have no idea what drained me of my energy, in which case a passive is totally appropriate. However, it does lack clarity for the very reason you suggest "${SUBJECT} exhausted me" changes the meaning--"I was exhausted" doesn't specify who or what is responsible for the action of the verb. By not mentioning what exhausted you, the sentence looses a small amount of specificity.
"I am covered in green paint" is also passive because what covered you in paint? Something or someone is doing the paint covering, but by using the passive voice you can obscure the subject.
While we are recommending articles, Orwell has some enjoyable things to say about the use of the passive language in politics.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Writing in such a way so that you can be understood isn't sufficient. You should always write in such a way so that you cannot be misunderstood, and using the active voice with its higher specificity goes along way towards that. However, exceptions will abound. As one of my professors used to say, "Language is the result habits--all of them bad".
Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#33[deleted]
Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#34In 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…
Hemingway is actually pretty simple, I'm writing a library which implements something similar. "Grammarly" exists, but I think the suggestions are silly. This Foxtype editor is fancy, but Hemingway produces better results in practice.
What programming language would a library for this have to be in for it to be especially useful? I'm doing it in JavaScript for now, since I can think of immediate cases where I can embed it. Elisp will come immediately after that, since I compose my emails in Emacs most of the time. Next on the docket might be a C version, with the intent that you could add it to GTK+ apps.
Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#35I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
I don't think this is presenting terse writing as a new insight. The innovation here is (if I'm understanding it correctly) using a grammar parser to identify some fairly complex criteria (e.g. avoiding left-branching sentences).
Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight. Every 4 or 5 years everyone celebrates terse writing like it's new. FTFY.
Writers periodically resurrect brevity.
Concise is better than brief.
Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#37Earlier 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…
> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me" I don't think that a correct analysis of the sentence. The exhausted is an adjective, similar to I am tired , but saying "Something tired me" would have a totally different meaning, because it's a different, unrelated sentence. ("I am covered in green paint." also doesn't seem like it's passive voice, but maybe I'm wrong.) As far as I can tell, "our work here is done" is indeed passive voi…
Replacing 'done' with a different adjective in the second sentence makes it clear that that sentence is also not passive. E.g.
"Our work is difficult."
Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#38I feel like every 4 or 5 years, everyone gets together and celebrates terse writing like it's some new insight.
I feel like every 4 or 5 comments, someone comments as if they have some new insight ;) Seriously though, this is a pretty useful tool, especially for people who are new at writing.
I have seen almost this exact same thing like a decade ago.
Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#39Re: A linguistics tool to help you simplify your writing
#40This reminds me of the "Hemingway" app that failed Hemingway: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 Can I also just point out that "I was exhausted." is not passive voice! And "Our work here is done." also shouldn't be highlighted, it's absolutely fine. What the hell? With these kinds of false positives, this seems like it would do more harm than good.
The app is correct, both of those phrases are passive. Grammatically the passive voice uses the equative verb to be with a past participle of the verb. Both those phrases satisfy that condition. Semantically, the passive voice involves action being done to the subject. Both those phrases also meet that condition. Rearrange them and you'l see: [1] "I was exhuasted" --> "${SUBJECT} exhausted me". The phrase may not see…
> Semantically, the passive voice involves action being done to the subject.
This is not correct. It happens to be true if the verb is transitive and denotes a physical action, but that is accidental. The passive is defined in syntactic terms (including the past participle you mention), not in semantic terms.