I want to clear up some confusion about that poor misunderstood verb \u201cto be.\u201d Strunk & White\u2019s \u201cElements of Style\u201d has some culpability in creating the confusion, so I intend to take the venerable authors to task over this, after which I will let the poor bastards rest in peace.<\/p>\n
In the second half of their section \u201cUse the active voice,\u201d Strunk and White focus on such locutions as \u201cthere is\u201d (and \u201cthere are\u201d and \u201cthere was\u201d and \u201cthere were\u201d) that have nothing to do with the passive or active voice.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the example they give us:<\/p>\n
There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s nothing wrong with this sentence. And it\u2019s certainly not an example of the passive voice. It\u2019s simply an idiomatic way of saying \u201ca great number of dead leaves were lying there on the ground.\u201d We take the verb \u201cwere\u201d and the adverb \u201cthere\u201d and put them idiomatically at the start of the sentence. It\u2019s not wrong. It\u2019s the way we say things like this, like my first sentence in this paragraph.<\/p>\n
To \u201cfix\u201d their example, Strunk and White find a different verb altogether and rake all the sentence\u2019s words up into a nice concise little pile:<\/p>\n
Dead leaves covered the ground.<\/p>\n
The reason they don\u2019t simply change the verb from passive to active is that they can\u2019t. The original verb, \u201cwere,\u201d is neither active nor passive, because the verb \u201cto be\u201d doesn\u2019t have active and passive voices.<\/p>\n
The verb \u201cto be\u201d (and its conjugal kin: is, are, was, were,<\/em> etc.) happens to serve as the auxiliary verb we use to form the passive voice. Many people (and some writing instructors among them, people who get paid for what they are supposed to know about the English language) wrongly assume from this (and from the confusing discussion in \u201cThe Elements of Style\u201d) that all instances of the verb \u201cto be\u201d are passive. They are not.<\/p>\n Readers aren\u2019t entirely to blame for confusing these two fundamentally different \u201cElements of Style.\u201d By putting their objections to \u201cthere is\u201d in a section titled \u201cUse the active voice,\u201d Strunk and White led readers to that confusion; led us to assume that all forms of the verb \u201cto be\u201d are somehow vaguely related to the passive voice. Again, they are not.<\/p>\n The origins of this mistake may lie in darker corners than \u201cThe Elements of Style,\u201d but the book\u2019s misleading conflation perpetuates this mistaken belief that all instances of the verb \u201cto be\u201d are passive. Once again, this time with feeling: they are not.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing wrong with the verb \u201cto be.\u201d I used it in the last sentence of the last three paragraphs above to be absolutely unequivocal. \u201cIs\u201d is not a weak verb.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a wonderful verb and a powerful. We call it the \u201ccopula\u201d because it allows a subject and its complement to hook up and become as one. They copulate. And that\u2019s how grammar babies are made.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be\u201d is a verb of being, as opposed to an action verb. A verb of being shows a state of existence; an action verb shows an action being performed. It\u2019s the difference between saying \u201cBob is a fisherman\u201d (a state of existence) and \u201cBob fishes\u201d (just something Bob does).<\/p>\n As a verb of being, it allows us to make definite, unequivocal statements.<\/p>\n Bob is a fisherman.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not a passive sentence. There\u2019s no stronger, more unequivocal way to say that Bob\u2019s a fisherman. We could say \u201cBob makes his living as a fisherman,\u201d but readers might infer that to mean that Bob would rather be doing something else: \u201cBob makes a living as a fisherman, but at night he dreams of becoming a federal bureaucrat.\u201d<\/p>\n These terms \u201cactive\u201d and \u201cpassive\u201d refer to the position of a subject and object relative to the verb that connects them. We can say \u201cthe Coast Guard fished the hapless boaters out of the water,\u201d or we can rearrange the sentence to begin with the object: \u201cThe hapless boaters were fished out of the water by the Coast Guard.\u201d Which sentence is \u201cbetter\u201d always depends on which words you want to emphasize and why.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t deny that Strunk and White have helped many of us write more effectively. They make some mistakes along the way, and their influence perpetuates some of those errors. But that\u2019s the story of human culture. And, really, my problem with this helpful little book is just a matter of chronology.<\/p>\n Strunk\u2019s original composition is 100 years old. A lot has changed since then in the ways we talk and write. We live in a world less formal than Strunk\u2019s \u2014 or even White\u2019s. The assumptions under which public discourse operates have changed dramatically. And the 75 years since World War II have witnessed the exponential growth of The Bureaucracy and the exponentially exponential spread of bureaucratese.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not enough anymore to just say \u201comit needless words.\u201d We have to think more carefully about which words we omit and which we use and why, so we don\u2019t end up sounding more like dictionaries than human beings. There\u2019s no need to teach students to \u201cdemonstrate oral communication skills\u201d when we can simply teach them to \u201ctalk to each other intelligently.\u201d<\/p>\n We all love the sound of the human voice. And when we\u2019re reading, no matter what we\u2019re reading, we enjoy hearing that voice come to us through the printed word. And we love it when a writer can guide us carefully through a tough problem or explain a muddy situation in crisp, economical sentences or analyze a complicated issue in clear and patient terms.<\/p>\n When we\u2019re writing, no matter what we\u2019re writing, we should let the sound of our human voices, our humanity, come through. Our readers will love us for it.<\/p>\n Sure, some discussions require a more formal language than we use in everyday conversation. To write like grownups, in control of our voices, perhaps the most important lesson we need to learn is how to balance these two qualities: how to let our normal everyday voices come through without sounding gabby; and how to write precise, formal prose without sounding like some supertechnolegalistic pencilneck from the Bologna Bureau.<\/p>\n The Roman poet Horace said \u201cart is long, life is short.\u201d So it is with language: it\u2019s bigger than any of us. It evolves as the creation of the entire human race, not just a few time-bound style guides. In its plasticity and infinite variety, language offers us more freedom in how we use it\u2014freedom to use it well, freedom to use it badly\u2014than any of our prescriptive tendencies can nurture or amend. But its fecundity is greater and its bounty more plenteous than can ever finally be inhibited or restrained or suppressed.<\/p>\n \u2022 Jim Hale can be contacted at jimhale821@gmail.com or through his website, jimhalewriting.com. The Alaska Press Club in 2016 awarded him the Suzan Nightingale Award for Best Columnist.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I want to clear up some confusion about that poor misunderstood verb \u201cto be.\u201d Strunk & White\u2019s \u201cElements of Style\u201d has some culpability in creating the confusion, so I intend to take the venerable authors to task over this, after which I will let the poor bastards rest in peace. In the second half of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-5550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5550"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=5550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}