Re: emacs documentation: what's active voice, passive voice?

[Uday Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

On 10/3/2010 4:06 AM, Xah Lee wrote:

> The Language Log recently has a blog asking readers to identify
> passive/active voice. (Apparantly, they've been beating this horse for
> a while, but i only started to read Language Log last month.) Before i
> tackle the question and post my redoubtable comment with implicit
> offense at grammarians, i thought to myself: it's been some 17 years
> when i read anything technical about passive/active voice in Struck&
> White... so let me look into Wikipedia to refresh myself just so i
> won't come out a fool.

Gosh, for a while there, I thought Emacs had begun to complain about passive voice.  Heaven forbid!

>
>      * 〈50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice〉 (2009-04-17) By Geoffrey K
> Pullum. The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32): B15. chronicle.com
>
> Quote:
>
>      The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in
> which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from
> limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has
> not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has
> significantly degraded it.
>
>      ...
>
>      What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being
> retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they
> don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four
> pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to
> correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses.
> “At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is correctly
> identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all
> errors: ...

Pretty damning — or it would be if Strunk and White had actually claimed any of those were passive constructions. They don’t. Here’s how they introduce these examples: “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.” (My link is to the online text of the Strunk-only 1918 edition, but the passage is unchanged in later editions.)

Now, Strunk and White themselves use the passive voice in that sentence, so one might say they are violating their own rules (though they’re not — they don’t say the passive may never be used, only that active constructions tend to be more forceful). But they don’t claim that their examples are all in the passive voice. Excessive deployment of the passive is only one of the weaknesses they discuss in this section. Their point is not only to urge the use of the active voice but to encourage the use of “active” transitive verbs rather than limp declarations of being. It’s sound advice: “dead leaves covered the ground” really is more forceful and better than “there were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.”

One can fairly complain that Strunk and White perceive the threat to good style as coming from only one direction. Consider their next section, in which they command, “Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.” “Denial,” “evasion,” “colorless” — these are tendentious terms. Someone who takes the authors’ advice too literally will always write fortissimo, without any understanding of the uses and virtues of the pianissimo. Irony, impartiality, subtlety, and negation do have a place in good writing. And bad prose can be Stentorian just as it can be anodyne, though admittedly most writers, especially in academia, err on the mushy side.

   --  The Elements of Bad Style?
       Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy	
       http://www.amconmag.com/mccarthy/2009/04/26/the-elements-of-bad-style/

I have no idea why the linguists have begun to stab each other.  But it looks like a good idea for Computer Scientists to stay out of it.

Cheers,
Uday