*phfft*

[ksmith]

In response to this, most particularly, this line:

"For starters, passive voice and excessive verbiage do not make you sound smarter."

Perhaps not. But if I try to write my reports in active voice and remove the excessive explanation, my manager will make me rewrite said reports until I reincorporate passive voice and, well, the excessive verbiage thing. Conservative company. Conservative field. I can count on one hand the number of papers I have read over the years that were written in active voice--attempts have been made (heh--I just slip into that old PV) to nudge the ocean liner away from the passive voice iceberg, but those nudges just didn't take and down we went with all hands. One technical writing instructor--an outside contractor, fwiw--tried to convince us several years ago that active voice was the way to go and that passive voice was a thing of the past, but as I noted above, it's still SOP for papers and publications. It's not good form for newsletters and interoffice communications and other less formal documents, but I fear it may remain the standard for publication, at least in some fields, for some time to come.

Can't argue much about the grammar issue, since I've run into it personally, but make sure the person you critique is a native English speaker before you hit them too hard. English is, from what I've heard, not the most logical of languages.

Comments

[fancythat2.livejournal.com]

Right on.
Passive voice is de rigueur for some types of writing AND in some agencies/companies. Been there done that.

[moon-happy.livejournal.com]

It's a tough, uphill battle in most industries. Interestingly, I got the Air Force Academy English department to do a one-day seminar at my company, and their influence helped turn the tide. At least our engineers stopped fighting us thereafter. But if you're alone in the battle with no support, there are more interesting fights to pick!

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that save for a few non-native speakers, I haven't noticed a pressing grammar issue. But I will confess that even though I write books n stuff, I'm not the world's greatest grammarian. I doubt I crack the 50th percentile. Shameful in some ways, I suppose.

*hangs head*

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

It's a tough, uphill battle in most industries. Interestingly, I got the Air Force Academy English department to do a one-day seminar at my company, and their influence helped turn the tide. At least our engineers stopped fighting us thereafter. But if you're alone in the battle with no support, there are more interesting fights to pick!

The military during the latter half of the 1970s promoted the use of active voice, etc. Then the smarm and slime and sleaze and paraliterates of Reagan and Bush I got in, and shoved everything to reset and obfuscation...

A lot of the "It has been demonstrated that" style occurs because the full attribution isn't there, and it's one thing to say, "Pons and Fleischman's experiment on cold fusion (reference)..." where the reference is actually there, versus "it is generally accepted that" which latter involves not having to specify all the references one can think of, just one or two maybe.... It also gets around having to specify who did what when you don't know who did it, and finding out lis going to take you three months, if it can be found out. Papers have delivery dates... Ted Atwood (Ph.D chemistry) is standing over my shoulder saying things like "I can't remember how many times you send in a paper, and the next day get the reference to the paper you needed as a reference....)

I looked at the referred thread, and noticed that the people complaining were doing things such as posting sentence fragments, and using "was" instead of "were" in subjunctive clauses. I do not get impressed by people's arguments claiming grammatical priority if they themselves are failing to observe such rules of grammar.

Another factor is that many current SF & fantasy novels use "which" instead of "that" in examples of the sort, "Which was not correct" -- concenations of words which form a sentence fragment because they stary with "which" rather than "that," which the publisher has promulgated as if they were sentences....

The turgid academic prose style is annoying, and I find it even more annoying when I find it in fiction, there are some writers whose work it occurred to me Wednesday night to label, "stilted prose." It reads much as abominable turgid academic scientific and engineering prose styles--I will read that sort of style in technical content material for content/if I am doing something that someone is paying me for. I do not generally read it for "pleasure." There was a machine-translated article I read years ago when in the military, from a Soviet technical publication, which article was parodying the turgid academic ponderous Russian prose style, complaining about essentially "publish or perish" publications. It was pointing out that there were way too many articles being published that really should have been correspondence between the two people who were specialists in some particular field discussing particular things of interest only to one another, instead of wasting forests of paper (I don't remember the exact words, it was indeed though saying that the publication of such articles, was a waste of trees and paper--and did so in what was clearly intentionally turgid academic prose).

It takes a lot of temerity and stubborness and most relevantly, effort to go against the style police where passive voice is rife, and stomp on the abuse of passive voice in one's writing. It takes a lot of effort to write in the active voice if one doesn't know who did something or who is doing something or who will be doing something, for example. It;s a lot easier to shall, "this shall have been done" than to say something is going to be done without actually knowing who is going to do it.... Instruction manuals one can put directions into the imperative voice "Do this, do that..." in the direct instructions. But then there are the cases of, "once the button has been pressed..." which is passive voice, and is the path of least effort/though/resistance...