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Mary Dash's Writing Tips

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Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#61

Post by thaumasiotes »

potatoyogurt wrote: post #59
thaumasiotes wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no passive voice in the sentence you quoted There is no finite passive verb, but "acknowledged" is a passive form in the sentence in question. It's just a participle rather than a finite verb.

okay, you're right, i wasn't paying attention. shame on me. Still, I think it is a stretch to point to the use of this passive participle as the reason why this sentence works or doesn't work.

> okay, you're right, i wasn't paying attention. shame on me.

I find this attitude troubling in combination with the argument made all over this thread that you can tell the people who say not to use passives are full of it because they can't even identify a passive when they're looking at one. (And you're at least flirting with that argument in your comment above.)

It's completely true that the advice not to use passives is spurious. That advice is an American cultural phenomenon in the same way that advice not to sleep in a room with a running electric fan is a Korean cultural phenomenon, and it's just as valid.

But it's kind of difficult to simultaneously make the arguments that (1) You don't know what you're saying; you can't even tell whether a verb is passive or not, and (2) OK, this verb is passive and I didn't notice, but that shouldn't take anything away from my arguments.

I'd prefer to see the case for passive usage made based on the actual purpose the passive serves (letting you rearrange the elements of the sentence, so that the order in which they are presented better suits the overall flow of the discourse) than based on gotchas.

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#62

Post by thaumasiotes »

ellius wrote: post #53
thaumasiotes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Austen reverses the sentence structure to pack the punch at the end. > 2 good principles are: > 1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence. > 2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end. > The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals. This is true, but another major use of passive voice is to put the punch of the sentence at the beginning. Where you…

You're right, this is really the deeper principle. I'm talking more "useful rules of thumb" as people are trying to build intuition for why passive voice might be useful. But at the end of the day it gives you more options about how to structure information. I think like a lot of tools it's easy to turn into a foot gun, so having some ideas about when and why it may be useful is good.

By the way, while the "punch" of a sentence is often placed either first or last for stylistic reasons, and both are fine, there is another kind of phrase for which final position is strongly preferred.

I believe they're usually referred to as "heavy" phrases[1], but the intuition is just that a phrase may consist of a lot of words, e.g. "the man who I spoke to yesterday about repairing the car". That phrase is, syntactically, just a noun phrase, and theoretically might fit into a sentence at any position where you might find "the cat" -- but in fact, phrases that heavy really, really benefit from being postposed if at all possible. Placing a heavy phrase in the middle of a sentence imposes memory burdens on the listener/reader that a short phrase like "the cat" wouldn't.

I bring it up partly because this is the kind of thing I find interesting, and partly because I think some editors might have this idea in mind, be unsure how to phrase it, and call it "the punch", when "the punch" is a better fit for a phrase that is felt to be especially relevant, surprising, or otherwise possessed of high emotional energy.

[1] e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10936-010-9163-x -- "Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long direct object phrases at the end of a clause rather than next to the verb."

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#63

Post by btilly »

knee-cartilage wrote: post #58
btilly wrote: post #45

Judging by this sample, Mary Dash should be receiving writing tips, not giving them. Do you doubt me? Consider the opening paragraph: Readers prefer active voice sentences, and we should try to use the active voice in most of our business writing to communicate our message most effectively. Active voice clearly identifies the action and who is performing that action. Unfortunately, much of government writing is in th…

do we really need to be putting all our writing down to grade 5 level

You do if you want to understood by the average American.

Please remember that simple words do not imply simple ideas. As Hemingway said when criticized for his simple language, Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#64

Post by weinzierl »

btilly wrote: post #63
knee-cartilage wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do we really need to be putting all our writing down to grade 5 level

You do if you want to understood by the average American. Please remember that simple words do not imply simple ideas. As Hemingway said when criticized for his simple language, Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

I'm sure the average Non-American reader appreciates it as well. Even more so all English as a second language readers like myself.

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#65

Post by mrob »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #49
mrob wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice relies on passive voice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." If you specify who's acknowledging it then the joke doesn't work.

> If you specify who's acknowledging it then the joke doesn't work. Not quite, the original is very explicit about who acknowledges the truth in question. What do you think is the difference between "it is a truth universally acknowledged" and "it is a truth acknowledged by all"?

If you find a single counterexample then "acknowledged by all" fails. "Universally acknowledged" is more vague, so you can claim you meant universally acknowledged only within a certain group of people. The source of the vagueness is the use of the passive form. The sentence is funny because the narrator is exploiting this vagueness in a self-serving way.

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#66

Post by Joker_vD »

ellius wrote: post #42
naniwaduni wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orwell also had no fucking idea what he was talking about and couldn't identify a passive to make a point about it. Since you bring up "Politics and the English Language", I'll pull up some "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive": > This is not a statistical quirk. Orwell’s writing features significantly more passives than typical prose. By one count, on average in typical prose about 13% of the transitive verbs a…

He also freely admits at the end of the essay that he's sure he committed many of the sins he's preaching against. I suspect he'd also freely admit that there are reasons to use the passive voice. But I think his primary complaints, especially his egregious examples of academic and political writing, were right on the money.

And to quote from that very essay, "Professor Hogben... while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means".

That is, "egregious" used to mean—even as recent as in Orwell's time—"blatant, obvious, unconcealed, glaring". But apparently all such words also gain a secondary shade of meaning "bad" and come to mean "baltantly, openly bad, and proud of it".

All the more reasons to use smaller, shorter words.

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#67

Post by JadeNB »

hammock wrote: post #55
btilly wrote: post #45

Judging by this sample, Mary Dash should be receiving writing tips, not giving them. Do you doubt me? Consider the opening paragraph: Readers prefer active voice sentences, and we should try to use the active voice in most of our business writing to communicate our message most effectively. Active voice clearly identifies the action and who is performing that action. Unfortunately, much of government writing is in th…

There are two commas you can remove and one you can add (after "unfortunately"). Overall great edit.

> There are two commas you can remove and one you can add (after "unfortunately"). Overall great edit.

I have come to appreciate over time that most people have an inbuilt, highly intuitive command of where commas should go, and that any two people will disagree mightily over it. To me, those commas can be removed, but doing so disrupts the readability of the sentence since they are usefully signalling where one might pause—but I know from experience that plenty of people, including fluent native speakers of English, use way fewer commas than I do.

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#68

Post by JadeNB »

mrob wrote: post #23
puzzledobserver wrote: post #18

I concede that people have a tendency to overuse the passive voice, perhaps to appear less assertive, but... I find this injunction against the passive voice simplistic. The active and passive versions of a sentence _mean_ different things, and one cannot blindly substitute one for the other. Compare: 1. There was a cat in the house. She had not been fed by her owner that morning. She meowed loudly at the passing pos…

The famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice relies on passive voice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." If you specify who's acknowledging it then the joke doesn't work.

> The famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice relies on passive voice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." If you specify who's acknowledging it then the joke doesn't work.

While it doesn't have the same punch (possibly because just lacking the familiarity), what spoils the joke about "Everyone acknowledges that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"?

EDIT: mrob points out elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604262), there regarding the use of 'all', that words like 'everyone' may imply literally every single person in a way that 'universally' doesn't; but then this may easily be dealt with by a constrution like "The mass of humanity acknowledges …" or "Civilised society acknowledges …".

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#69

Post by MaxBarraclough »

dctoedt wrote: post #38
jfengel wrote: post #15

I find the "avoid gobbledygook" instruction a little odd. It's really about adopting a less formal register, which is fine, but words like "additional" and "purchase" aren't really obscure. From the examples, it seems to be more about avoiding French- and Latin-derived words, and using Germanic-derived ones instead. We do tend to use our Norman root words in legal and other formal registers, and Anglo-Saxon roots do…

> They're perfectly cromulent words, with shades of meaning different from their "synonyms", and can be used to enhance writing rather than obscure it. I had to look up "cromulent." Your use was in jest, right?

It's safe to say it was. The original usage on The Simpsons was perfectly cromulent word, which jfengel has referenced verbatim.

(I'm disappointed to report that Firefox isn't convinced of the cromulence of cromulent.)

Re: Mary Dash's Writing Tips

#70

Post by hammock »

JadeNB wrote: post #67
hammock wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two commas you can remove and one you can add (after "unfortunately"). Overall great edit.

> There are two commas you can remove and one you can add (after "unfortunately"). Overall great edit. I have come to appreciate over time that most people have an inbuilt, highly intuitive command of where commas should go, and that any two people will disagree mightily over it. To me, those commas can be removed, but doing so disrupts the readability of the sentence since they are usefully signalling where one migh…

Commas are required between two independent clauses. However, in this case the commas in question don't separate two independent clauses. There is only one subject in each sentence. They are not necessary (maybe even incorrect) and create distance between the subject and verb, decreasing readability. For this reason I suggested removing them.
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