12th Archivist
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And now for something completely different...

I made a mention of proper English grammar and spelling in chat a few days ago. After a bit of conversation, Tahnan of the speakers brought up

12th Archivist wrote:
Half an hour was spent on it before I figured the solution

and stated it was completely ridiculous and was completely wrong. This is not unsurprising, coming from a semantics professor, but the way he (and others) treated it was as if was the stupidest-sounding thing in the world. I took no offense, but it did make me wonder why passive voice was not only considered bad writing, but also considered really, really idiotic, almost as if I had said "omg thts 2 hard lool" or something to that effect.

What are your thoughts on passive voice when not used properly? (That is, when the receiver of the action is more important than the doer.) Is it completely stupid? Why is it discouraged in both academic papers and informal speech?

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NoahT
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I don't know if I would call it stupid, but from experience I can say the main problem people have with the passive voice is that it demonstrates lack of commitment or owning an action.

-Noah

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da rogu3
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Passive voice is mainly used in technical speech, where the reader doesn't care who did it, but instead what was done.

Now it isn't actually a grammatical error, but is generally frowned upon because there are times where using the passive voice can prevent the reader from understanding what you're trying to say - i.e. it weakens the clarity of your writing.

In your quoted sentence, you used both passive and active voice, which makes it sound incoherant. You could have said "Half an hour was spent on it before the solution was figured out", which is bad because it doesn't tell the reader who it's talking about. Or you could have put "I spent half an hour before I figured out the solution", which is good use of the active voice. In that context, anyone would find your statement ridiculous, as there was simply no need to even use the passive voice (it doesn't even make you sound posh).

tl;dr - use the passive voice only when the action is more important that the speaker.
And never use passive voice in informal speech, unless you want to be ridiculed.

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[Last edited by da rogu3 at 06-25-2011 02:33 PM]

west.logan
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The Logan takes issue with that statement.

I agree with Rogu3, and that's what I was going to point out: you used both passive and active, which is not correct in any context. I read a book one time where the author switched from "he walked along the beautiful forest" to "I saw a bird and started back down the path" and it drove me nuts. It did make it seem like he didn't re-read it himself.

I do a lot of technical writing and the idea with the passive is that you generally represent a company or work on a team. You don't say "I formatted the data" or even "we formatted the data" but "the data was formatted in accordance with the requirements of document..."

I was asked to write in an active voice on a personal report, however. "I analyzed the data and found that..." It sounds like I'm actually claiming my work that way.

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Jatopian
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I've never met anyone who got uptight about passive voice and wasn't a teacher. Maybe I just use voices well of my own accord? :s

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da rogu3
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Jatopian wrote: I've never met anyone who got uptight about passive voice and wasn't a teacher.

Well, let's put it a different way.

You know when someone uses your instead of you're. Or When Someone Starts Each Word With A Capital Letter. And you just stare at the post thinking what a *^$@#. Using passive voice incorrectly is just as bad. And using it when talking to someone on a personal level is possibly the most irritating way to use it.

I'm not a teacher, just someone who prefers people to be grammatically correct.

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[Last edited by da rogu3 at 06-25-2011 07:21 PM]

Rat Man
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I think that we could stand to be a bit less rigid about what is and isn't correct. For instance, if you wrote "The soup was spilled all over the floor" instead of "Larry spilled toe soup all over the floor" and the fact that Larry was the one who did it was a major plot point (as it sparked a heated argument) then the one who did it was more important to the story, but the passive voice could still be used to show the readers Larry's side of the argument, as it comes across as less blaming.

da rogu3 wrote:
And using it when talking to someone on a personal level is possibly the most irritating way to use it.

Really? I do that all the time and nobody's ever expressed annoyance at it, but people are always expressing annoyance at me for other things, so it seems that if the majority felt that way, I would know.

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west.logan
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I'm confused. What are you talking about?

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da rogu3
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Rat Man wrote:
Really? I do that all the time and nobody's ever expressed annoyance at it, but people are always expressing annoyance at me for other things, so it seems that if the majority felt that way, I would know.

I haven't seen you use it, so don't invite trouble for yourself

And yes, using passive voice for stylistic effect is good, as long as you know how to. (otherwise it could easily backfire and sound bad instead)

west.logan wrote: I'm confused. What are you talking about?

Is this aimed at me?

west.logan
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No, it's aimed at Rat Man. I thought that everything had been covered already in your first post. He mixed passive and active, that was the main point. And no one ever said passive was bad. Only in certain contexts so I didn't understand Rat Man's comment.

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da rogu3
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Oh right, I think Rat Man was just providing an example of where passive voice could be used. (although if he read the above posts properly he would realise that we weren't being so rigid about what is or isn't correct, as you said, just in certain contexts)

Someone Else
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It was then decided that passive voice was something never to be used.

Rat Man
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I was providing an example of when the passive voice could be used when the action is not more important than who did it. And that was how I felt you were being rigid about it. My point was not mixing passive and active, nor did I intend to imply that anyone was saying that passive was bad.

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Banjooie
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For instance, if you wrote "The soup was spilled all over the floor"

"The soup had spilled all over the floor." Congratulations, it's now active voice.

Tahnan
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Tahnan...stated it was completely ridiculous and was completely wrong.

Whoa, hey now. I don't think there's anything wrong with the passive voice. I think that many English teachers and grammarians would indeed call it completely wrong, but I myself would not. (It's important to note that I said this in the context of 12th's claim that he writes in correct English, in contrast to people who ignore rules that they know perfectly well, b/c grammer isnt important lol)

On the other hand, I do in fact think "Half an hour was spent on it before I figured the solution" is indeed completely ridiculous as compared to the much saner "I spent half an hour on it before I figured out the solution".

In part, this because of what Trickster says, though she slightly misstates it:

[Passive voice is] bad because it is far less common than English active voice

It's not really quite the fact that it's less common; it's that it's, to use a technical term, "marked". (By which I mean that it's less common.) That is to say, there are things in language which are the default; varying from the default makes something "marked", and thereby draws attention to it, possibly encouraging the listener to look for reasons why a marked construction was used. Of course, how much attention it draws may depend on how unusual the reason for using it is; when I wrote "...a marked construction was used", I didn't even think about it, because it made sense to be vague about who uses the marked construction. On the other hand, "Half an hour was spent on it", when it's so apparent who it was that spent the half an hour, reads very, very oddly to me.

Someone Else
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Trickster wrote:
Unless you speak Klingon, or Yoda, or some other horrible geek bullcrap.

Hey! Klingon and Quenya are perfectly legitimate languages. There's even a course that studies them at my university!

Tahnan
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Trickster wrote:

Banjooie wrote:

For instance, if you wrote "The soup was spilled all over the floor"

"The soup had spilled all over the floor." Congratulations, it's now active voice.

Isn't that just past-tense passive voice? The actor is the cause of the spilling, not the object being spilled (this is easy to miss as "spill" is often used passively, as a means of deflecting attention from the guilty party).

No. This is active voice; Banjooie is right.

There are a number of verbs that alternate in this way; the standard example in the 1970s was "Floyd broke the vase / The vase broke"; you can also see it with "John melted the butter / The butter melted", "Mary froze the water / The water froze", "The wind opened the door / The door opened", and so forth. (I think, though please don't quite me on this, that it's exclusively change-of-state verbs that work this way.) But both sentences in each of these pairs is in the active voice; the passive would be "The butter was melted / The water was frozen / The door was opened".

Similarly with "The soup had spilled"--it's past perfect, just like "John had spilled the soup" is, but it's active. The passive would be "The soup had been spilled."

The point, of course, is that the passive isn't the only way to hide agency. You're right, of course, that if there's soup on the floor, and John knocked over a bowl that resulted in it being there, then John is the agent of the action. But there are plenty of ways to express the situation that leaves out the agent but doesn't use the passive: "There's soup on the floor", say, or "The floor is awash in soup". Which is why a flat dictum like "avoid the passive!" isn't really helpful, and why I wouldn't call any use of the passive "completely wrong".

Tahnan
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Trickster wrote:
Linguistic recognition happens much faster than it seems to in that meta-realm where we try to remember the process of the recognition of words. It literally takes the brain longer to process sentences that are uncommon in a particular language, because we're expecting one thing and receiving something in a contradictory format.

It literally takes the brain longer, but we're talking milliseconds. I don't think the problem here is that a sentence in the passive voice takes 1.5 seconds to process as opposed to 1.2 seconds--some people I speak with want those hours of their life back, but no one has asked for their 300 milliseconds of processing back when I use the passive voice.

Nor is the problem the fact that the order has become "object-verb-subject", which actually it most emphatically hasn't. In the passive sentence "Hours of time were spent by me", the subject of the sentence is "Hours of time", and it comes before the verb; there is no object. The patient (the "recipient" of the action, which in a typical sentence is the object) comes first, and the agent (the "doer" of the action, which in a typical sentence is the subject) is buried in a prepositional phrase. However, other sentences where the patient comes first aren't frowned upon by traditional grammarians nor hard to parse, such as "It was the soup that John spilled on the floor" (the thing spilled, the soup, comes before the spiller, John); nor is it hard to parse English sentences where the subject literally does come after the verb, such as "Into the room came three men" or "So say we all!". Sentences like these are unobjectionable, and while not entirely unremarkable (they're marked, so they indicate certain a stylistic choice), they don't present any serious psycholinguistic processing problem.

skell
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Tahnan wrote:
It was the soup that John spilled on the floor.

On a side note this is, more or less, something you'd have an extensive contact with if you were learning English in Polish schools, not sure how it looks somewhere else.

Exercise 1:
Make a specific question about underlined part of the sentence and provide an answer.
Johh spilled the soup on the floor.

Answer:
What did John spill on the floor?
It was the soup that John spilled on the floor.

Obviously a sane person would answer "The soup", but most of the time you were required to provide your answers in full sentences, just for the sake of training your language skills. Rarely these were that difficult though.

It literally takes the brain longer, but we're talking milliseconds

Sorry, can't agree. As a not native speaker, passive sentences sometimes take me as long as few seconds to decipher. Most likely it all comes down to how much contact you had with the language, especially this given grammatical construction.

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NiroZ
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Trickster wrote:

skell wrote:

Tahnan wrote:
It literally takes the brain longer, but we're talking milliseconds

Sorry, can't agree. As a not native speaker, passive sentences sometimes take me as long as few seconds to decipher. Most likely it all comes down to how much contact you had with the language, especially this given grammatical construction.

(Must not say "boo-yah", must not say "boo-yah", must not say "boo-yah"...)

Let me help you out there. IIRC, non native/beginner speakers often struggle to recognise sarcasm as well, but unless there's insufficient cues, I've never had difficulty processing it. I imagine this difficulty does not hold true to languages their fluent in.

Furthermore, on a cognitive level, things like the subliminal and stroop effect show that we process words and sentences,and the meaning within, extremely fast.

I also think the wiki will be useful here

skell
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Well, please take a note of the fact that I said sometimes, which doesn't mean always, not even often, but rather rarely but happens. I just wanted to point out that what Tahnan pointed is not always true for everyone.

Since passive voice is not something I use or hear frequently (both in English and Polish) whenever I see it used it catches me by surprise - now that I think about it, the only time I can remember encountering passive voice in English on a regular basis was during exercises in school. Coming back to the point, it's the fact that I encounter this construct rarely that at times I might need to translate it in my mind to catch the right meaning. It's the same as with encountering a grammatical construct you barely ever heard before - you might need a second or two to analyse it and understand properly.

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NiroZ
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Trickster wrote:The act of recognizing an "awkward feeling" to a sentence is not something we do consciously. We get the feeling, and then we can attempt to rationalize to explain why we got that feeling.

True, but, the relationship between behaviour and belief goes both ways. But in any case, how is this relevant? Nobody was saying anything about the passive voice being more awkward.

I've taken Stroop several times in a clinical setting, and I've administered it in a clinical setting at least 400 times. The Stroop effect works in both directions in the presence of conflicting stimuli, and the slowdown is significant in both cases. The Stroop effect is not really relevant here, though. It features no grammar and has nothing to do with processing speed for spoken language.

Ah, the reason I brought up the stroop effect was that it shows that we process meaning really fast, hence the conflict. That this fast processing speed could extend onto sentences and grammar doesn't seem controversial to me.

If anything, what Stroop teaches about the delays caused by semantic interference suggests it is likely that hearing a subject, then having to reformulate it as an object once passive voice is recognized (because the voice marker occurs after the object), should cause some delay in any listener. It doesn't matter if the listener is a non-native, a native, or a computer. The act of revising one's options for outcome takes additional oomph.

Huh? The stroop is entirely visual (at least, originally), and considering there isn't any conflict of information in sentences using the passive voice, I'm not sure how you can claim that.

Tahnan
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OK, I really don't want to turn this into a duck-measuring contest, and I don't mean to unzip my credentials and lay them out on the table, but to be clear, I do have a PhD in linguistics. I didn't take a lot of sentence-processing in graduate school, but it was part of my undergraduate degree, and part of what I taught at Penn. In general, I really do know what I'm taking about here.

On the other hand...

Trickster wrote:

Tahnan wrote:
It literally takes the brain longer, but we're talking milliseconds.

In the case of constructions that are truly awkward, those milliseconds are the difference between a sentence seeming "natural" and "ungrammatical".

Well...no. There are other milliseconds that are the difference. Or, really, "seconds". If you hear something that's outright ungrammatical, there will certainly be a delay. The milliseconds it takes to parse something like the passive aren't an indication of ungrammaticality here.

(To say nothing of the complete lack of processing difficulty of the sentence More people have been to Moscow than I have, which most people nod at acceptingly when you say it to them, and only when asked what it means do they realize that maybe something went wrong in that sentence. It's not processing time that makes it ungrammatical.)

Anyway, this is way outside what I study or have deep familiarity with. I don't know whether passive voice suffers from effects due to recognition delay, but I do know that awkward constructions have this problem.

And this is really the key point here. An awkward construction will certainly take time to process. The passive voice isn't awkward. It's just marked.

As for skell's difficulty parsing the passive, well, as a researcher you should really know better than to take the processing difficulties of a non-native speaker as indicative of anything about the language. For instance, I find the sentence O pracownikach zobowiązanych do udziału w szkoleniu decyduje ich pracodawca incredibly hard to parse, to the point where I'm not even sure it's a sentence. That because I don't speak Polish. I suspect skell will do much better with it. But even setting aside that abductio ad pretty seriously absurdum, of course a non-native speaker is going to find certain constructions harder to parse, depending on what constructions their own language has, how much they've learned, and so forth. There are serious issues to be studied in second-language learning (I volunteered once to listen to a series of sentences spoken by English-learning native speakers of Korean, to judge how natural their sentences sounded), but they tell us things about second-language learning; you don't measure a second language learner's reaction time to a sentence to determine facts about the sentence.

The spitemaster
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Does passive voice translate better than active voice? I always found that English was the exception out of most languages- grammar rules were often different.

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NiroZ
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I'd suspect that really depends on the language it is being translated into

Tahnan
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The spitemaster wrote:
Does passive voice translate better than active voice? I always found that English was the exception out of most languages- grammar rules were often different.

NiroZ is right; it very much depends on the language. The World Atlas of Language Structures is a good place to look for a quick overview of this sort of thing: http://wals.info/chapter/107 in particular (if you don't want to read the details, there are numbers at the top, and a button to see a map).

English isn't all that exceptional; a fair amount of its grammar is the same as other Germanic languages. There are certainly things that English lacks, like gender on nouns and some tense distinctions, which might just mean that it's harder to translate into English. (Depending on what you mean by "hard".) If you have an hour to spare, you can look at the WALS summary of features of English, which will let you click on the links to see how common things are. (So, for instance, if you click on "Order of adjective and noun", you find out that 373 languages in the survey are Adj-then-Noun, like English; 878 are Noun-then-Adj; 110 don't have any preference; and five do something weird that you really probably don't want to know about.)

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[Last edited by Tahnan at 06-28-2011 01:47 PM]

Dischorran
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Tahnan wrote:
and five do something weird that you really probably don't want to know about.)

What, you're just going to leave it like that?

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Tahnan
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Dischorran wrote:

Tahnan wrote:
and five do something weird that you really probably don't want to know about.)

What, you're just going to leave it like that?

If you really want to know, the remaining five don't have adjectives that modify nouns at all, so they use relative clauses. Thus, "The man saw the black cat" would actually be said in a more literal translation as "The man saw the (cat that is black)". Except of course that it's not guaranteed that those five languages even have adjectives at all; they may just have verbs (the text describes the case of Mesa Grande Diegueño), so that it's something closer to "Man-the-[subject] (cat that-isblack)-the see". (You can tell it's a verb because it gets the same prefixes and suffixes that verbs do.)

Disclaimer: I don't speak Mesa Grande Diegueño, nor Choctaw, which is another language in which adjective meanings are (arguably) expressed by verbs, or any of the other languages like this. If you want more detail, you're on your own.

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Interesting discussion!

May I put a word in for punctuation here? It is a crucial part of our understanding of written English (and perhaps other languages) and is also a significant factor in making spoken English understandable. If I may comment on the two sentences Trickster uses above - they are not punctuated properly, which makes them visually trickier then they need be and means that anyone reading those sentences out loud would be more likely to say them incorrectly.

I think the first sentence has two possibilities:

1 The man, who won the grand prize at the fair where they had the largest rides in the county, ate heartily.

2 The man who won the grand prize at the fair, where they had the largest rides in the county, ate heartily.

I would favour the first as being clearest.
In the second sentence I think there is one (best) way to punctuate:

The man, who ran back and forth in the nude while screaming obscenities and jumping in the air with glee, ate heartily.
(Although quite how he managed to eat at all, while doing those other interesting things, is beyond me frankly!)

In both sentences it would be possible to add other commas, but too many can add to confusion rather than adding clarity.

Someone reading these sentences out loud would (should) use the commas to ‘phrase’ the sentence, making it easier for the listener to understand.

Edit: Actually, looking at them again, if I was to write those sentences in my novel I would be tempted to use the emdash rather than commas.

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[Last edited by Elfstone at 06-28-2011 05:24 PM]

Tahnan
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Elfstone wrote:
If I may comment on the two sentences Trickster uses above - they are not punctuated properly, which makes them visually trickier then they need be and means that anyone reading those sentences out loud would be more likely to say them incorrectly.

I think the first sentence has two possibilities:

1 The man, who won the grand prize at the fair where they had the largest rides in the county, ate heartily.

2 The man who won the grand prize at the fair, where they had the largest rides in the county, ate heartily.

Ah! But both of these mean something different than Trickster's commaless sentence. (Note: at least in American writing. I don't know how the British set off relative clauses with commas, but I believe it to be the same.) That's because when a relative clause like "that has the largest rides in the county" or "who won the grand prize at etc." is generally taken to be restrictive without commas--narrowing down the possibilities--but non-restrictive with commas--just adding another piece of information.

Sentence 1 means that the man--you know, the man, the only one under discussion--ate heartily; and, by the way, he won the grand prize etc. etc. Sentence 2 means that the man who won the grand prize at the fair--you know, the fair, the only fair we could be talking about--ate heartily; and, by the way, that fair had the largest rides in the county.

But Trickster's sentence means that the person who ate heartily is the one person who's both (a) a man and (b) who won the grand prize at a certain fair, where that fair is the one with the largest rides.

As an analogy, consider:

1. The world leader who was born in Hawaii is Barack Obama.

2. The world leader, who was born in Hawaii, is Barack Obama.

The first sentence is telling you that out of all the world leaders, the one who was born in Hawaii is Barack Obama. The second sentence seems to be telling you two facts about the person who is "the world leader": (a) he was born in Hawaii, and (b) he is Barack Obama. That's a very different sentiment, and many people would object to calling Barack Obama "the world leader" (as opposed to "a world leader").