Hating on hating on the passive voice
Feb 23rd 2011, 18:43 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
GEOFF PULLUM really doesn't like people who abjure the passive voice. And when I say he really doesn't like them, I mean that he has devoted post after post after post on the subject, using language that only just stops short of swearing.
He has one solid point. People who are going round giving grammar advice—particularly on the passive voice—had better well know what the passive voice is. The passive does not mean "a sentence that is squirrely about agency", nor does it have anything to do with physical or metaphorical passivity. "I enjoyed the massage" is semantically pretty passive, but it is grammatically active. "The village was destroyed by my tanks" is pretty vigorous, content-wise, but it is grammatically passive. "We are forming a committee to investigate these regrettable incidents in order to ascertain their cause so as to avoid them in the future" is weaselly corporate-speak, but it is grammatically active. "The moron who screwed this up is going to be fired so fast there'll be nothing but two smoking shoes left on the floor under his desk" is pretty semantically active, but it contains not one but two passive clauses. Anyone to whom this is news should immediately suspend all grammar punditry and sit down with a grammar book first.
So Mr Pullum is right to give the BBC's John Allen a working-over. Mr Allen tells writers to avoid the passive, but he thinks "there were riots" is an example of it. It isn't. Nor is "West Bank shooting mars truce", nor is "the case took on racial overtones", nor many of the other examples Mr Pullum and the Language Log crew has found over the years.
But Mr Pullum dislikes people giving ill-informed grammar advice so much that he goes a bit far. He taunts:
Mr Pullum is right that many people misunderstand the passive. And he's right that passive clauses can be semantically vivid, while active clauses can be woolly and vague. He admits that he doesn't mind if someone uses "avoid passives" as a flexible bit of style advice rather than a badly understood rule of grammar. But he leaves out something he well knows: the passive voice is the commonest way to avoid mentioning the agent in an English sentence. As such, it's a handy tool for non-apologies and other avoidance-phrasings. Those who recommend against it—The Economist's style book among them—are not all fools. Our advice: avoid the passive, except when you shouldn't. That was Orwell's advice, too: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
So Mr Pullum is right to give the BBC's John Allen a working-over. Mr Allen tells writers to avoid the passive, but he thinks "there were riots" is an example of it. It isn't. Nor is "West Bank shooting mars truce", nor is "the case took on racial overtones", nor many of the other examples Mr Pullum and the Language Log crew has found over the years.
But Mr Pullum dislikes people giving ill-informed grammar advice so much that he goes a bit far. He taunts:
it just isn't true that the passive buries or hides responsibility: if you put the by-phrase in, it lays it on the line prominently. If you leave out the by-phrase then the agent doesn't get specified, but that's often exactly the right way to phrase things, and doesn't imply any deviousness or evasiveness... Do government ministers use more passives in statements after policies fail? Do company chairmen use more passives when profits fall? Do team managers use more passives after games they lost? It sits there as an empirical hypothesis on which somebody (you, maybe?) could write a Master's thesis. But as far as I am aware, that thesis remains to be written.I don't have time for a master's thesis right now, but on one point I'm pretty confident. Yes, "if you put the by-phrase in", the passive lays the responsibility on the line prominently. But as Mr Pullum is very aware, the by-phrase is optional, and frequently omitted. As such, it's the most straightforward way, syntactically speaking, for a coach, boss or bureaucrat to seem to be admitting something went wrong while not putting themselves, or any other human, on the line. "Serious mistakes were made." "Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long." "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address ... which were considered offensive..." Yes, that last one is a Language Log post criticising Pope Benedict for a classic "non-apology" after he offended Muslims with a speech criticising Islam.
Mr Pullum is right that many people misunderstand the passive. And he's right that passive clauses can be semantically vivid, while active clauses can be woolly and vague. He admits that he doesn't mind if someone uses "avoid passives" as a flexible bit of style advice rather than a badly understood rule of grammar. But he leaves out something he well knows: the passive voice is the commonest way to avoid mentioning the agent in an English sentence. As such, it's a handy tool for non-apologies and other avoidance-phrasings. Those who recommend against it—The Economist's style book among them—are not all fools. Our advice: avoid the passive, except when you shouldn't. That was Orwell's advice, too: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/02/passive_voice
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