Thanks to Victor J. Banis I’ve just read a wonderful article in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which Geoffrey K. Pullum explains why William Strunk and E.B. White, authors of The Elements of Style, are grammar incompetents. Here is Pullum’s response to Strunk & White’s proscription of the passive voice:
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:
“There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
“It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had” also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
“The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired” is presumably fingered as passive because of “impaired,” but that’s a mistake. It’s an adjective here. “Become” doesn’t allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that “A new edition became issued by the publishers” is not grammatical.)
I also really like his exploration of S&W’s foolish notions about using the singular verb with the subject ‘none’:
An entirely separate kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is the mismatch with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.
Consider the explicit instruction: “With none, use the singular verb when the word means ‘no one’ or ‘not one.'” Is this a rule to be trusted? Let’s investigate.
Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for “none of us.” There is one example of it as a subject: “None of us are perfect” (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It has plural agreement.
Download and search Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of “none of us” with singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural (“I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of sunset”).
Examine the text of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There are no singular examples, but one with the plural (“None of us ever do”).
It seems to me that the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.
The article explains most of my fights with American copyeditors. Most of the ones I’ve had don’t know a thing about grammar, and they have tin ears. We clash on just about everything, particularly verb tense. Verbs are subtle instruments.
This article filled me with glee. Read and be free!
To be fair, Strunk & White doesn't identify the sentences as passive voice (although they are in the section about using active voice). After giving an example of active and passive voice, and when passive voice is necessary, S&W say, “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,'” then give the four examples quoted above.Although we may (wrongly) infer the four examples are passive voice, it's not stated by the authors.
I’ll take your word for it; thanks for pointing that out. But, oof, I’m crushed. You’d think someone writing for the <>Chronicle of Higher Education<> wouldn’t make such a silly error. Where are the fact checkers when you need them?
I think the important thing when dealing with any of the (literary, screenwriting, name your subject) gurus, is to listen to the advice, then find your own voice.Certainly you are an accomplished enough writer that editors should listen to you. (Who was it that said, “those who can’t write, edit?”)
DianneorDi says Strunk and White don’t identify the four sentences (the first ones in each pair) as passive — and Nicola concedes the point (too soon, Nicola!). I don’t think there was any mistake in what I said. It’s true that the left hand column is not explicitly headed “passives”. But Strunk and White are recommending that the left-hand sentences should be replaced by active ones like those in the right hand column. The only clauses that are not active are the passive clauses: “active” and “passive” are antonyms. Putting those four sentences (one of which is genuinely a passive) in a section that opens by attacking (illicitly) the use of the passive voice, and recommending that they be replaced by active equivalents, is equivalent to saying that they are passives. And sure enough, dozens of writing instructors across the country have assumed that, and said so in materials you can find on the web, and quoted the same examples as passives. DianneorDi’s defense is clever and subtle (is she a defense lawyer, perhaps?), but it doesn’t really answer my charge that Strunk and White have done more to confuse Americans about grammar than to enlighten them.
I am smiling on this fine Sunday morning. “Tin ears.” As always, it is nailed on the head by you, Nicola.Sarah
Geoff — I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been defended by a few from time to time. ;D<>“Putting those four sentences … in a section that opens by attacking … the use of the passive voice, and recommending that they be replaced by active equivalents, is equivalent to saying that they are passives.”<>:blink blink: Is it? Who made up that rule? Maybe they just didn’t want to add a heading for “Pepping Up Tame Sentence Descriptions and Expositions.”<>“[D]ozens of writing instructors across the country have assumed that, and said so in materials you can find on the web, and quoted the same examples as passives.”<>And is that Strunk & White's fault or the writing instructors (who assumed)? You were obviously not fooled. Why were they?As to your charge that “Strunk and White have done more to confuse Americans about grammar than to enlighten them,” I have no idea. I can't even conceive of a way to measure such a thing. It's been 30 years since I read it in high school, and I don't ever remember using it as a grammar. (I'd be more likely to reach for the AP Style Sheet or equivalent.)If I were as clever and subtle as you intimate, I might argue that it's not S&W that have done the damage, but the writing instructors who've blindly used it as gospel.Thank God I'm not clever or subtle.
Apparently it’s all about the context…
http://mleddy.blogspot.com/2009/04/pullum-on-strunk-and-white.html
“And is that Strunk & White's fault or the writing instructors (who assumed)?”
To a great extent it *is* Strunk & White's fault. If they really intended to switch topics from active-vs.-passive to active-vs.-something-else, they didn't do a very good job of signalling the change. Managing the flow of topics so that the reader can understand your point is an important part of writing clearly (though one that S&W ignore, as far as I can recall).
So if S&W didn't intend to suggest that their “before” examples were all passive, they committed what was, from a style-advice viewpoint, an even greater sin by organizing their material in a way that was likely to confuse the reader. In other words, they violated Rule 12: Choose a suitable design and hold to it.
Or, as Strunk presumably would have told his class:
Choose a suitable design and hold to it!
Choose a suitable design and hold to it!
Choose a suitable design and hold to it!
Pullum's article may have filled you with glee; it filled me with disgust. This guy is actually “head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh”? His article is filled with numerous grammatical and syntax errors — leading conjunctions and dangling participles. I knew more about English grammar by the time I was in 6th grade, and that was decades before I'd ever heard of Strunk & White. He gets an “F” for the day.
If you're talking about 6th grade then I'll assume you mean American grammar *g*
Sorry you're feeling disgust. It's not good for a person.