Followup on the grammar poll

[julesjones]

Yesterday's question about a point of grammar was inspired by a post on the subject over at Britwriters. Some of the British erotic romance writers have noticed that many of the American editors they work with insist on removing all "was" usages as being passive tense and wrong, which tends to freak one a bit if one speaks a dialect of English where the different sentences have distinctly different meanings. I haven't run into this personally, but I work with one publisher and hence one editor, who happens to be good at editing in both dialects.

I was telling watervole about the post, and she suggested that it might be simply an artefact of people blindly applying rules they've been taught without understanding the basis of the rules (which to some extent was my own reaction), or alternatively that language varies widely in the US and it might be a regional thing. So we thought it might be interesting to run a poll to see who did and didn't see a difference, and what their unprompted comments might be.

I tried to set up the question so that it wasn't too leading, and split out US and Canadian because if there was a difference it would be interesting to see which way Canadians went -- American or Commonwealth. Right now there are 64 answers, 63 of which say there is a difference. The one that doesn't is from someone who says they're British.

Now, it's a biased poll. Apart from anything else, if you read this blog, there's a high probability that you like reading and that you read both American and British English writers, and thus have been exposed to different usages. But looking at the comment thread, it seems to me that there is a subtle usage difference between American English and British/Commonwealth English, but Americans are perfectly capable of understanding the distinction that British English makes. Which is a good thing, considering how much we use it. Consider, for example, the opening lines of this post and the previous one, which were purely unconscious and not chosen to make a point.

I also note with interest that far more of you will click a radio button in a poll than will comment in text format. Is this one of the attractions of running the things? Will I succumb to the desire for shiny toys and the desire for feedback, provided in one convenient package by a simple (hah!) piece of code? Tune in next week to find out...

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I've come across the 'was = passive voice' before, but only in Americans - somewhere out there must be a school of teachers who have drummed it into their students.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Passive VOICE. That was what I was trying to remember that I thought was weird.

That seems like a half-remembered rule, because passive is "was done to" constructions, like "the ball was hit by the boy."

I've never encountered this in the wild.

I sometimes see students who think using passive voice is wrong, because they've been taught that it's always wrong, not that it's a tool with a specific purpose (like using personal pronouns), and I have to undo some of what their secondary school teachers have done.

[julesjones]

There's a fair bit of unlearning what you were taught by rote at school when you get into writing for a hobby or a living. I can understand why some of those rules were drummed into us as rules, but some teachers seem to better than others at getting across the message that you need to learn to follow the rules in order to learn when they apply and when and how to break them, rather than learning them utterly blindly.

[julesjones]

That's rather what it feels like to me -- that some group somewhere have had a sensible guideline conditioned into them as an inflexible rule, and it's now into a second or third generation of people who don't understand why they're doing it, only that they must.

[brooksmoses]

Yes. I think the appropriate place to lay the blame is Microsoft Word; this was one of the things that its grammar checker catches as an "error", and has caught since the earliest versions -- "was hit" and similar constructions are flagged as "passive voice" and this is flagged as an error. And I wouldn't be surprised if "was hitting" got erroneously flagged that way as well, in the earlier versions.

The reason for flagging this as an error is, as far as I understand it, that in the types of business writing that Word is intended for, replacing something written in the passive voice with something written in the active voice tends to produce clearer, more concise, and persuasively stronger results. And Word's grammar checker does not have a way of distinguishing between "stylistically, this might be worth considering" and "this is grammatically wrong".

[julesjones]

That makes a lot of sense. I rapidly turned off the grammar checker on Word because it drove me nuts with its suggestions being mostly either wildly inappropriate for the context or flat out *wrong* -- but I was confident enough to do so, and was surrounded by people who were equally unimpressed with it. I pity anyone who has learnt their grammar from the thing.

[fiona-glass.livejournal.com]

I wonder, as well, if it has something to do with publishers using *business* style guides (eg Chicago Manual) as guides for rules on creative writing? They may also stress that passive is 'wrong' for the sake of clarity in business reports and the like - but the same rules don't always translate very well to *creative* writing.

I'm both touched and worried that my original Britwriters blog post has provoked some discussion! To correct a comment on Jules' previous post, I wasn't criticising American editors. When I wrote the post, I honestly believed that the rules between US and British English when it came to passives were different. It's only after getting comments from several American grammar experts that I've realised that ain't necessarily so!

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I said you'd get into polls... I think their appeal to the reader is that of expressing opinion in a single click rather than having to work out how to formulate it.

I'm becoming a little alarmed about what people are learning about grammar. legionseagle belonged to some online writing group whose younger members (British, as far as I know) were always telling her she should remove all auxiliary verbs such as "was" and "had" on the grounds that they weakened the sentence, or put off the reader, or some such nonsense. They appeared to have no idea of anything but the most basic tense and mood. Presumably this starts from the idea of a simple past tense being active and direct, but they seem to be applying that idea as an inflexible rule which eliminates all shades of meaning. And they seem so certain of themselves that I suspect the fallacy has somehow got into parts of the teaching profession.

[julesjones]

I can see the appeal and expected more clicks than comments, but I was a bit surprised by how many more.

I'm convinced that part of this is indeed a "second generation" problem. There are now enough people out there who have acquired this inflexible mindset that some of them are bound to be in classrooms teaching it to a new generation by now.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

It may have been due at least in part to people like me coming late to the discussion, seeing that people had already said what I would have said, felt it would be pointless to say it again but -- ooh, look! a radio button! -- and the extra datapoint in the poll would add weight to the argument. :)

[julesjones]

Indeed. I think I shall be doing more as I think of things where they might provide interesting fodder, though I'll try not to spam people to death with them.

[shana.livejournal.com]

It only takes a few seconds to click a radio button; it takes a few minute to compose a thoughtful post.

And considering that I clicked your poll when I'd been awake less than fifteen minutes, I was in no condition to compose a thoughtful post.

[julesjones]

I know I've gone "ooh, clickie" on someone else's poll when I didn't have anything sensible to say by way of expanding upon it, but I was a bit surprised by just how big the gap was. Possibly because I didn't really expect that that many people would actually read the post.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Whoa! Whatever else "he was doing it" may be, it is not passive voice.

[julesjones]

Well, apparently some Americans think that it is, or at least is something called passive tense. Which has been boggling me ever since I first heard the complaints about it from British writers being told to stop doing it.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

If they're calling it passive tense, that's even worse. It's like thinking the apostrophe is for words ending in "s".

[karinfromnosund.livejournal.com]

I actually had a half-formulated comment in my head, but then I saw that others had said more or less what I thought, so I didn't do it. I don't think you'd have much use for sixty identical comments...

[julesjones]

Ah, but you're from Usenet, and thus know the horror of the "me too!" :-)

[doire]

I've been pondering the ways I respond to comments.

Something very quick is no problem, so a poll click is easy.
Something that I really want to say to some one I know well is comparativly simple too. If I'm misunderstood, I can easily explain and not be worried.

Its the in between comments that are troublesome; the ones I want to get right, but are not quite sure if we use words the same way - never call an American's new pride and joy "really dinky" - the ones where I want to say something and really mean it, when I um and arr and never get around to posting for fear of getting it wrong.

And on another note entirely, I followed your links, went and bought some e-books, had a look round and only narrowly escaped buying "twilight". That could have put me off forever.

[julesjones]

I know polls are easier to answer, from answering them myself, but I was a bit surprised by how many people did take the trouble to read through the options and click something.

I don't normally get that many comments on my posts anyway. I do try to make a lot of them open rather than closed, inviting comment, but they tend to be the sort where after half a dozen comments anyone coming past will probably feel that they won't be adding anything new. Like this poll, in fact -- there were some excellent comments teasing out the shades of meaning, but a lot of people coming past later would have felt that someone else had already said what they wanted to say. So I suspect I underestimate how many people actually read my posts instead of wandering past occasionally.

And on another note, "differing tastes" is one of the reasons why I write reviews. :-) If you're talking about the Meyer book, I know a lot of people love it, but it was quite clear from the comments at Smart Bitches Trashy Books that I wouldn't. Reviews are useful that way.