The Passive in English (2011)
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The Passive in English (2011)
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Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#2I enjoyed this rant at the end of the article:
“[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these authors have a remarkably high frequency of passives in their work: more than 20 percent of their clauses with transitive verbs are cast in the passive, a distinctly higher frequency than you find in most of the prose written by normal people who don't spend their time pontificating hypocritically about the alleged evil of the passive.”
Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#3I enjoyed this rant at the end of the article: “[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these author…
It really points up the difference between linguists, who understand language, and grammarians, who merely peeve about it.
Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#4I felt the essay was undercut by overcomplicated and repetitive explanation. The passive voice is pretty easily identified.
Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#5I felt the essay was undercut by overcomplicated and repetitive explanation. The passive voice is pretty easily identified.
The essay was undercut by the very point of the essay.
I must admit, that's a new one on me.
Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#6I felt the essay was undercut by overcomplicated and repetitive explanation. The passive voice is pretty easily identified.
The essay was undercut by the very point of the essay. I must admit, that's a new one on me.
I guess. If the central claim of the essay is that it really genuinely takes three pages to explain what the passive voice is.
On the other hand, sections 2 through 7 of the article really just belabor the same point made in section 1. If I just say "wow, 7 sections!" and stop reading, then, sure, it looks like the concept really is very difficult to explain. But when I read all those sections, I don't feel convinced anymore.
Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#7I enjoyed this rant at the end of the article: “[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these author…
It really points up the difference between linguists, who understand language, and grammarians, who merely peeve about it.
Absolutely. The grammarians George Orwell and E.B. White are infamous for doing nothing with language except complaining about it.
Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#8Another great article by Pullum on the English passive: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html. (Better than the submitted one, in my opinion!)
Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#9I aways took the aversion of English speakers against the passive voice as a sign of linguistic incompetence. Instead of teaching students how to write well on the passive and active voices, they prefer to reduce the language to its minimum denominator.
The confirmation is in [1]: many journalists and writers don't even know how to define the passive. It is a sad thing to watch.
Re: The Passive in English (2011)
#10I felt the essay was undercut by overcomplicated and repetitive explanation. The passive voice is pretty easily identified.
> The passive voice is pretty easily identified.
Apparently many people who are supposed to know how, don't. Take a look at the "terrible example" the article links to in section 5: