More on passives

(Hiatus from blogging because of editing the last couple of weeks. I’ve had as many as six manuscripts—including two reports, a thesis, articles that keep coming, and a book chapter—sitting on my computer desktop and emails from writers weeping about deadlines. I’m down to two—the thesis and the book chapter, but I have to get those done soon because another thesis is on its way and at least two or three more articles are in the pipeline. I think everyone I know went to work this summer to have a half a dozen articles ready to go by fall, and now they all want it fixed yesterday.)

So, passives. I’ve mentioned that passives aren’t necessarily bad, but that they do cause problems with conciseness and with clarity. Perhaps we should talk about how to identify them.

Simple answer: turn on the computer grammar checker. I recall telling my husband, after his stint with the federal government and their idiotic writing rules, that his writing was full of passives. If he wanted to keep the page limits required by journals, or at least avoid paying the extra page charges, he needed to identify them and get rid of as many as possible. He didn’t believe me until grammar checkers turned up, and then he discovered that nearly every one of his sentences had a nice squiggly green line under it. 

I said it was the simple answer, but it’s not the complete answer. Grammar checkers use simple rules to find what MAY be passives, but they are wrong about 40% of the time. Worse yet, as we said before, passives are not always bad. Sometimes you need them. So if you take a grammar checker’s word for it, you’ll be revising a lot of writing that doesn’t need revising for all the wrong reasons.

I’ve had students tell me that other teachers (usually in high school) told them never to use any form of the verb to be. From what I can tell, the teachers never explained why, although that may have been inadequate reporting from the students instead of inadequate teaching. I suspect that teachers who tell their students not to use am, is, are, was, and were are trying to prevent their students from using passives. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work. 

Let me explain. (Those who know something about the English language have my permission to skip this. I’m over-simplifying.)

English generally has two types of sentences. One type is what I call a subject-linking verb-completer sentence (S-LV-C). These sentences use verbs that operate much like an equals symbol (=). 

• The man is thirsty.
• The woman is a doctor.
• The dog seems friendly.
• The football player turned pale.
• Bread becomes stale quickly in a dry climate.

Note that in each case what follows the verb says something describing (or completing) the subject. The subject is not doing anything. The most common linking verb is to be. If you do what your high school English teacher instructed, you will be eliminating perhaps half of all the sentences you want to use. That’s not a good plan. Much of what we write about involves a state a being, not a state of doing.

Actually, these types of sentences are the least likely to be turned into passives. It’s just too awkward. However, if you write one of them and turn on the grammar checker, most of the time the grammar checker will tell you that you may have a passive and would you please review what you have done.

The other type of sentence we typically use is the action (not active) sentence, where the verb involves some action that the subject is doing.

• Birds fly south in the winter.
• Cows eat grass.
• Farmers grow corn.
• That dog bites people.

In this sort of sentence, we have the actor (birds, cows, farmers, dog), the action (fly, eat, grow, bites), and in some cases the acted upon or object of the verb (grass, corn, people). South, by the way, is not an object, just so you know. It’s an adverb.

This type of sentence is the kind that gives trouble. Every sentence that has subject-verb-object (S-V-O) can be written as passive (which isn’t necessarily bad, as I keep saying).

• Grass is eaten by cows.
• Corn is grown by farmers.
• People are bitten by that dog.

Note that, in every case, the sentence is longer in passive voice than in active voice. That’s problem number one. 

Problem number two? In English, we use position to determine a word’s role in the sentence. We don’t use word endings much. So in a basic sentence like S-V-O, we expect the actor to come first, the action to come second, and the acted upon to come third. What happens if the object comes first and the actor comes last? We have to rethink the entire sentence, and very often, we have to reread the sentence, especially the long ones. That takes time we could better spend doing something else.

Problem number three? In passive sentences, it is easy to leave essential information out. At that point, especially in technical and scientific writing, we have a very real problem. We must have all the essential information. Let’s have a closer look at this. Consider the following scenario:

You have a son who played with the neighbor’s dog. The dog bit the boy. You take your son to the emergency room and run in yelling, “The boy was bitten! The boy was bitten!” What is the first question the ER people will ask?

>> 

Wrong. They’ll ask if you have insurance (/facepalm). I’ve been telling that same joke for the last 20 years. I must stop.

Think about it though. You have left out a critical piece of information. Does it make a difference if the boy was bitten by a dog as opposed to say, a tick? Proper treatment requires complete information. 

Good science requires complete information. Passives get in the way.

Is it Nato or NATO?

A question from Wyoming Bill: 

Argh. It is "NATO". Not "Nato". I don't like this British trend. What does +Nora Ransom think?

From Wikipedia:
"While acronyms have historically been written in all-caps, British usage is moving towards capitalizing only the first letter in cases when these are pronounced as words (e.g., Unesco and Nato), reserving all-caps for initialisms (e.g., UK and USA)."

My answer:

That's not something I've seen before. An acronym is an abbreviation, as you probably know, and not all abbreviations are capitalized. I'd be tempted to point out that an acronym of a proper name, just as an abbreviation of a proper name, should be in all caps, so UK, but NATO as well, although mm and wysiwyg. Radar, scuba, and sonar would be special cases because they have actually become words, which is not likely to be the case for NATO. Does that make sense?

And a few comments:

An acronym is an abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word. So UK is an abbreviation while NATO is an acronym.

Abbreviations and acronyms, unless they are universally recognized, should be defined.

A large number of acronyms have entered the English language as words.

            Sonar: Sound navigation and ranging

            Scuba: Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus

            Radar: Radio detection and ranging

            Laser: Lightwave amplification by stimulated emission of

                       radiation

Wisiwyg never made it although I still occasionally hear it from computer programmers (what you see is what you get).

Nearly everything about writing should made a certain amount of logical sense. Of course, whose logic and whose sense is another discussion for another day.

Passive Voice

Most of us have been told that using passive voice is not good for our writing. I beg to differ. It MAY not be good, depending on the situation and the reader. The form can be quite useful indeed, but if it is not needed, we as writers should not use it.

In some situations, passive voice is necessary. For instance, in any situation where the action is more important than anything else, passive is essential. Think announcements. “Classes are dismissed.” Do we care who ordered the dismissal? I don’t know about most people, but all I care about is not showing up for classes when it isn’t necessary.

Think the methods section of any experimental research report. No one reading an article that details the results of experimental work cares that lab technician Suzy Jones did all the scut work. They need to know exactly how the experiment was done so they can evaluate the results or replicate the results. The focus is on the action not on the actor.

Consider also this situation: an engineering firm has a project that failed. Management needs to know why the project failed so that they can avoid similar failures in the future. Most reports like this are written in passive voice to avoid any implication of blame. If a bridge fails, management does not want to say, “Engineer Joe Bob did not take into account the soil in the area when designing the support columns. When the soil failed, the columns collapsed.” That wouldn’t be good policy, unless Joe Bob has a pink slip in his immediate future. The sentence is more likely to read, “The soils were not sufficiently analyzed, and the columns were not adequately designed to withstand…” That describes the problem without coming right out and saying Joe Bob was an idiot, and he may not have been. It might have been that management set deadlines that failed to allow sufficient time for soil testing.

If you think about it, that sort of report makes sense. The idea is to learn from your mistakes, to avoid repeating them in the future. It’s rather difficult to learn from your own mistakes if your supervisor is hunting for a scapegoat instead of actually looking at what happened. Again, the focus is on what happened, not on who did it.

So passives are a useful tool. If you look, I used a good number of passives in the previous five paragraphs. Did you notice?

Most people would not notice, because those passives are appropriate to the context and because I don’t use too many of them. In fact, I think that is the key: you choose to use passives, for legitimate reasons, in specific situations, in a particular context.

However, we often use passives for other, less legitimate, reasons. As one student told me, his teacher wanted 5,000 words for a report, so he filled his writing with redundancies, circumlocution, and passives to get to 5,000 words. He knew that if he didn’t get his word count up, the teacher would grade his paper down, no matter how good it was, because it did not meet the imposed word count. Was the report any better for it? No. In fact, it was probably worse.

I do think teachers often impose a specific word count for a reason—they know that a subject cannot be covered appropriately in fewer words. Unfortunately, what they end up with is not more content but just more words, more fluff. (That is a problem with the assignment, but let’s not get into that.)

Other people will use passives to actually hide the actor. Politicians, for instance, do not want to take credit for tax increases, so they say, “Taxes will be raised” instead of “We voted to raise taxes.” Honestly, now, which statement would you prefer?

During Operation Desert Storm, I recall watching an interview of an officer with a helicopter unit who flew patrol over the Iraqi desert. He was describing a mission in terms that I found quite engaging. They were flying over terrain that he described in some detail, finding and checking on several ground units, then scouting ahead for those units. At that point, his entire narrative changed. They had spotted a truck carrying Iraqi soldiers heading for one of the ground units. The officer said, “Ordnance was deployed.”

All right, what can we say about that? Generally, we don’t like to hear that our soldiers blew up a troop carrier and killed a number of people. I suspect the officer had been trained to use jargon and passives in answering such questions, not because he didn’t know what happened, but because it sanitizes and makes acceptable actions that a good many people would find objectionable. As to whether that is acceptable, that rather depends on your point of view.

I tend to be suspicious of people who use passives regularly because I get the impression that they are hiding something. And I start looking for what they are hiding.

We also tend to use passives because we see them regularly in publications in our fields. Everyone else is doing it, so that must be the right thing to do. Why shouldn’t we?

I’ll tell you: because passives are longer than active voice; because the construction is ponderous and difficult to read; because passives encourage the use of other constructions that add to the length of writing, making it still more unreadable. If the goal of writing is to communicate clearly and concisely, then passives are a problem.