Strunk and White.

... just goes to show that you can't take anyone's word as gospel, even an expert's. Still found the book to be incredibly helpful and recommend it, highly. Most important thing I got out of it was to be concise and to trim away all excess.

I think Ken is right. Have a look at http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/ .If you drop down on the word&sentence level ,to passive /active you will find a more balanced advice.

• "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

"There was" and "it was" constructions are considered passive (passive expletive), and I know for a fact that this is the pet peeve of one big time editor.

The problem is, more than half the "Experts" think they understand the Active/Passive rules, and they don't. I had an English teacher friend, who submitted a short story for a contest and received a low score from one judge because every "was" was marked as passive. Of course they weren't but there was no way to convince the "Expert" judge.

My blood pressure just shot up, and I need to rant. Humor me by allowing me to differentiate between passive voice, emphasis on action, and the delights of characters who shape situations rather than just respond to them.

Passive voice


The terms "active voice" and "passive voice" apply only to transitive verbs, i.e. verbs that pass action from an actor to a receiver. In an active voice sentence, the subject of the sentence is the actor. For example, in "John hit the ball," "John" is both the subject of the sentence and the one who's doing the hitting. In a passive voice sentence, the subject of the sentence is the receiver of the action. For example, in "The ball was hit by John," "ball" is the subject and is being hit. Passive voice is useful if you want to hide the doer because you can omit the "by" phrase (The ball was hit) or if it makes sense to emphasize the receiver of the action (Ross Hall was built...), but passive voice sentences are slightly but measurably slower to read and harder to comprehend.

The verb "to be" is not a transitive verb because it doesn't transmit action, so by itself, it's neither active nor passive. You see it as an auxiliary to "hit" to form the passive voice in "The ball was hit by John," but as I say, by itself, no form of "to be" is active or passive. So you can't rule out using it by calling it "passive voice."

Emphasis on Action


Instead, "to be" conveys a state of being. "He is tall." "The room was dark." Overuse of "to be" creates a problem not because it's passive voice but because there's no action, not even action passively expressed. The story isn't moving along. The situation is static. That's why advice about writing description often says to do it in action (Not "the room was dark" but "he put out his hands to keep from tripping in the coal dark room") or at least with livelier verb ("Dark lay thick across the doorway").

I'm not good with description in general, so you have my permission to laugh at those examples, but you get the idea.

Active vs passive characters


Another sort of "passive" has to do with passive characters. Once again, this has nothing to do with passive voice. Rather, it refers to characters, especially MCs, who react to events rather than shaping them. By and large, we cheer for active characters more than passive ones, who tend to be seen as victims. We admire characters who persist and get up to try again after they're knocked down. We like them to have a goal they're struggling to reach, so we can hope along with them.

Mind you, as with everything else, that's not absolute. You can undoubtedly think of passive characters whose story you enjoyed. But usually, we like active characters.

So that's my rant. Those are three different things that get lumped together when well-meaning but wrong advisers tell someone to avoid the verb "to be" at all costs.

Thank you. I feel better now.

dawinsor said:

Another sort of "passive" has to do with passive characters. Once again, this has nothing to do with passive voice.

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agree with all your post, but I especially wanted to highlight this as it seems to be a commonly held misconception.

Not having a background in the academic study of English grammar I won't comment on the definitions of the active/passive construction, but it clear that this article is written by someone with a gaping chip on his shoulder.

For instance, this is the author's first complaint:

Some are tautologous, like "Do not explain too much." (Explaining too much means explaining more than you should, so of course you shouldn't.) Many are useless, like "Omit needless words." (The students who know which words are needless don't need the instruction.)

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The point is that many novice writers are not aware that they are explaining too much. The purpose of the advice is to encourage students to look back over what they have written and think, "Did I really need to explain at such length? Can I tighten this up?"

Perhaps no one is buying the author's book on grammar.

I think we'd discussed this article in an earlier post (can't remember where it is, though). To me, it came across as a commercial for the author's own style guide.

Geoff Pullam, the author of the article, is a linguist and a good one. He's also a good writer.

He does not now and never has taught writing.

Strunk and White was written out of sheer desperation when Strunk needed a very basic primer on writing for his freshmen comp classes at Cornell.

Strunk and White to this day is intended as a text for freshmen comp classes.

It works quite well for that audience--and yes, it's a good basic guide for the beginning non-fiction prose writer, with some decent advice for any writer.

But that's all it is.

dawinsor said:

A lot.

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Just wanted to say thanks. Awesome post that really got through to me and some mistakes I make.

dawinsor said:

Thank you. I feel better now.

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Me too.

justwondering said:

Not having a background in the academic study of English grammar I won't comment on the definitions of the active/passive construction, but it clear that this article is written by someone with a gaping chip on his shoulder.

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Actually, no, not so much. It's written by a linguist--which makes a difference in terms of governing assumptions about language and writing and what's important.

Strunk and White's initial emphasis was teaching how to write one particular thing--five page freshmen comp essays.

Comparing Pullam to Strunk and White is sort of like comparing the perspectives of engineers and artists regarding the Parthenon.

Follow Strunk&White's rules, don't follow them, it's all the same to me. But you must know what they say, and you must know why you are following them, or why you aren't.

Julie Worth said:

• "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

"There was" and "it was" constructions are considered passive (passive expletive), and I know for a fact that this is the pet peeve of one big time editor.

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One of my high school teachers would not let us begin sentences with "there are (were, is)." I think the idea was to break us of our bad habit more than to insist we never use it again.

BenPanced said:

I think we'd discussed this article in an earlier post (can't remember where it is, though). To me, it came across as a commercial for the author's own style guide.

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Don't trust Strunk and White in Grammar and Syntax forum (where else?).

-Derek

C.bronco said:

One of my high school teachers would not let us begin sentences with "there are (were, is)." I think the idea was to break us of our bad habit more than to insist we never use it again.

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I also had a teacher like that! It's an incredibly hard habit to break given how our modern society uses English.

Although I think passive voice should be used to a minimum, I've never seen the big deal with there is/was.

One thing that drives me absolutely bonkers about Strunk & White is the way that the self-publishing enthusiasts wave it in the air as an example of a Successful Self-Published Book.

No, it wasn't.

Yes, William Strunk privately printed the first edition. That was because back in 1918 the photocopier had not yet been invented. He was passing out copies of his class notes to save the students having to copy them down by hand as he lectured. It was well under fifty pages.

Many years passed. Strunk died. A dozen years later one of his former students, E. B. White, took a copy of Strunk's class notes, edited, revised, and expanded them, and sold the resulting book to Macmillan. The Elements of Style by Strunk & White, the continuously in print, highly influential, best-selling volume, is not and never had been self-published.

Here's the full text of the original, now long-since passed into the public domain: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/style.html

Julie Worth said:

• "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

"There was" and "it was" constructions are considered passive (passive expletive), and I know for a fact that this is the pet peeve of one big time editor.

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Big-time really doesn't mean anything. There are plenty of people in positions of power who are very well respected who aren't necessarily competent or right (hi current financial crisis).

Just had to throw that out there.

There was/there were as a sentence opener isn't necessarily passive, but it is a weak construction.

You may need to use a weak construction for any number of reasons in your writing. For example, to change the pace of a passage; not everything needs to be at a breathless pace and 120 decibels. You can also use the form to conceal information from the reader. For example, in a mystery in which the candlestick is the murder weapon, I might write, There was a candlestick on the table.

The 'dead leaves' example from Strunk:

The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.

There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.


Dead leaves covered the ground.

The sound of the falls could still be heard.


The sound of the falls still reached our ears.

The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired.


Failing health compelled him to leave college.

It was not long before he was very sorry that he had said what he had.


He soon repented his words.

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Strunk isn't saying that the forms he's disparaging are passive. He's saying that they're "tame" and "perfunctory."

I'd also like to note that the sentences he's using as bad examples are wordy and clumsy. But not necessarily passive.

As far as "breaking their own rules":

It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature.

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