Let’s Get Progressive — grammar neep
Katharine Kerr August 3rd, 2006
There are a number of grammar myths current in the genre writing community. A lot of people seem to believe, for example, that commas exists to mark pauses when, actually, they show logical relationships between parts of a sentence. Strunk and White cover commas quite well, but they leave out a common myth about verbs. For example, on another online service one poster stated that “a teacher at Clarion” had told him, “You should eliminate all uses of the verb to be in your writing because they’re all passive.” Um well, no, not really, not at all.Since I love tilting at windmills, I thought I’d take this latter myth on.
Anyone who’s read Strunk and White (and everyone who writes in English should read it) knows that the passive voice is a Bad Thing. It’s clunky, slow, vague etc etc. The trouble is, a lot of people don’t seem to quite know what verb forms constitute the passive voice. They confuse it with the progressive tenses of the active voice, and in desperation try to eliminate all uses of the helping verb “to be” from their prose. If they do, they lose an important tool.Â
Consider these two sentences:
The man saw the bird.
The bird was seen by the man.
The second is passive, the first, active. Who is acting in this pair of sentences? The man. He is doing the seeing. He is therefore the subject of the active verb, see. What is being seen? The bird. Therefore it’s the subject of the passive voice construction, “was seen.” The man, who is doing the seeing, ends up dumped into a weak prepositional phrase. What makes the second sentence passive is its meaning. The form, “was seen”, merely expresses that meaning. The presence of “was” alone does not make the sentence passive. The key to understanding the difference twixt passive and active is always the meaning.
Now consider these:
1. He walked down the road when he saw the bird.
2. He was walking down the road when he saw the bird.
Both are active. The second is in the progressive past tense. “Progressive” here is a latinate word that can be confusing. It means “joined in progress”, on-going, still happening at the point in Past Time where the story’s set. Progressive verbs are NOT passive. They are the most active forms of verbs in English. What we are dealing with here is duration, not the difference twixt active and passive. Progressive verbs use the present participle (the -ing form) plus some form of “to be” to express continued duration. The simple forms of verbs (walked, spoke, and the like) do not express duration.
Why is all this important? When you are trying to express parallel actions, that is, two things happening at the same time, the progressive tense works much better than the simple past The two sentences about the road and the bird have different meanings. The first cannot substitute for the other. “He was walking down the road when he saw the bird” means, basically, at the time that he was actively walking down the road, he saw the bird. The other has a possible implication that seeing the bird was some sort of signal for him to walk down the road, or perhaps that he walked down the road to get a closer view, or so on and so forth. Sentence 1 is ambiguous, in other words, where Sentence 2 is precise.
The progressive tenses have many other uses as well. In fact, what we call the “present tense” in English is nothing of the sort. Consider this pair of questions and answers:
 What do you do for a living? I write genre fiction.
What are you doing now? I am writing about English verbs.   Â
The “simple present”, that is, the first sentence above, refers to a general state or condition that’s not actually happening at the moment that I’m answering the question. (The proper name for the “simple present” in English is an “idiomatic aorist”, but that’s another subject.) The actual present moment requires a progressive tense. And “I am writing about verbs” is most definitely not a passive construction!
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The passive voice isn’t always a Bad Thing, which is important to remember. Some things sound awkward in the active voice and sometimes the information provided by the active voice is superfluous. Like sentance fragments: you can use them but not too much.
The mis-identification of passive voice led me to write an entire essay about it on my website. People seem to absorb the idea that it’s bad, without knowing in the slightest what it IS — and why you might want to use it from time to time.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who tilts at grammatical windmills.
Fine informative rant!
Smite the purveyors of false advice!
Ah, Kit, so glad you took on these two misdefinitions of passive. I hear them all the time, and it drives me nuts.
everbloom said,
Of course there are no absolutes. But often people use the passive to sound “profound” or as a tricky way to hide information that the point-of-view character knows/sees.
Strong, active verbs enhance clarity, enrich your prose, and keep the reader moving through the story.
Carol
Unfortunately, it’s not just misguided Clarion teachers who lead “to be” hunts. There are also misguided junior editors of the “I have a degree in English!” type.
Personally, while I think the passive voice can suck, I think the damage done by the “to be” hunters is far worse.
One thing I do think is true about the passive voice is that it’s often used by authors who are uncertain about what it is they’re saying.
Passive voice turns up in political-speak all the time (”Mistakes were made”)–a pernicious way of avoiding blame in bad circs.
Passive voice is usually a bad idea in action scenes, (”The attack was made at midnight” could read more energetically as “The enemy attacked at midnight”) but sometimes it is the right way to phrase something when you want to underscore the subject’s inability to act.
Yes and yes about the progressive tense. The thing about progressive is, sometimes it can slow a sentence down when you do not want to imply an ongoing action. “The thief leaped out at the man, and soon was dragging the body into the bushes.” That might read better, “The thief leaped out at the man, then dragged the body into the bushes.” In both cases we don’t see the attack, it’s implied, but the two actions before and after are distinct, not ongoing.
People who learn Latin don’t make this mistake
Amen, Lois. I learned more about English grammar in Latin class than I ever did in English class.
I’m feeling the urge to enroll in Latin 101.
Kit, thanks for writing such a clear, concise explanation of passive vs progressive construction. I am always fighting the urge to slip into the passive voice. It’s such a frustrating habit to break!
Commas are too breath marks. They just happen to also be grammatical marks. “A dessert topping AND a floor wax!”
Unlike, say, line breaks, which are only breath marks. Except when you enjamb. Or use them as your only punctuation.
—L.
Smite the windmill! This entry was a deeply satisfying read.
It gets worse, though. I’ve actually seen the assertion that “-ing” forms are weak (a criticism increasingly in use to stop debate) and should not be used. So that we must not write “The exploding walrus fell through the glass roof of the solarium.” We must write “The walrus exploded while it fell through the glass roof of the solarium.” Because the presence of that “-ing” thing is too frightening.
It’s like the old Stevie Wonder song, “Superstition”: these would-be writing mavens believe in grammar, but they don’t understand it. So they invent these taboos to protect themselves from its dangerous power (and secure their own).
I’m not sure what the solution is… compulsory Latin for everybody, maybe.
JE
I too learned a lot of useful grammar information by studying Latin and a couple of other languages as well. However, it is actually possible to learn English grammar in English — it’s just that no one seems to teach it to those who need it, ie, students, any more. That’s another rant I could go on but I shall restrain myself!
Part of the problem, though, is the terminology of the older English grammars. The earliest grammarians (roughly in Shakespeare’s time) had decided that English should be more like Latin and strove mightily to cram that round peg into the square whole. The result was silly rules like “split infinitives”. (English has no infinitive to split, folks.) In the process of reforming this antiquated system, (ahem), Mistakes Were Made.
Larry, some pauses happen to coincide with commas, sure enough. The problem comes from defining “marking pauses” as the primary function of commas. Non-restrictive phrases, for example, rarely require pauses when spoken aloud, but they do require commas for smooth silent reading. And of course, phrases like “for example” fall into this bag, too.
This must be contagious! I just wrote about this topic, saying pretty much the same thing, on 31st July on my own blog.
I have a problem with any statement that says a perfectly legitimate grammatical form is “bad”.
Passive, verb to be, continuous tense, starting a sentence with “And” or “But”, all adverbs ending in “-ly”, using another word instead of “said” in dialogue, past perfect tense, etc etc - all these supposedly “bad” things have their place in fine writing.
Experience, reading widely, and studying good writing are much better tools for a beginner writer than a set of rules about what is good and what is bad. Glad to see so many others agree with me!
One has to consider cultural differences, too, when talking about “good” English. There are a great many English languages, all over the world now.
British English, for instance, is much more forgiving of the passive voice than is American. It even turns up in adverts, which are generally trying to be snappy and effective like adverts everywhere.
James Enge said,
August 3, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Smite the windmill! This entry was a deeply satisfying read.
It gets worse, though. I’ve actually seen the assertion that “-ing†forms are weak (a criticism increasingly in use to stop debate) and should not be used. So that we must not write “The exploding walrus fell through the glass roof of the solarium.†We must write “The walrus exploded while it fell through the glass roof of the solarium.†Because the presence of that “-ing†thing is too frightening.
Like everything else ‘ing’ isn’t weak in itself. It is when newbie writers use it at the beginning of a sentence. Ie: Holding his shoulder, he leaped across the way. In which case ‘he’ is performing two simultaneous actions. That’s where some folks get confused. Even in the sentence you used to demonstrate your point. The walrus is exploding while it’s also falling. So…it’s more a case of clarity, I think.
I have a problem with any statement that says a perfectly legitimate grammatical form is “badâ€.
As do I. Every single thing in the English language, up to and including what’s left of our subjunctive, has a purpose. Know the purpose. Love the purpose. Make use of the purpose — when appropriate.
I’ve also got something on my website where I compare grammar to a system of magic. If you understand how it works, then it’s a source of power to you. Figuring that out was what made me start to like grammar. (And I think that revelation really did come in Latin class, while translating poetry that depended on playing with grammatical forms for many of its devices.)
Not to mention British English is a lot more forgiving of comma splices.
—L.
I’m aware of it, and I try my hardest to moderate it in my fiction writing, but I blame my tendency to use the passive on school and university. My essays at uni were full of the passive - and so were the books I read. It was the style, and it’s a difficult habit to break now!
Katherine Kerr said,
Which would be why I didn’t discover passive voice untill my grammar checker pointed out I was using it in a school science report. Australians use British English grammar “rules”.
As an English major and Latin minor at Western Washington University, I would like to thank all of you, both for recognizing the importance of purpose with regard to grammatical rules, and the value of learning another language as a means of evaluating our own. So many professors spout strange “rules” aobut how to write, without validating themselves. I believe that the form of writing (the grammar) can work with content if you can grasp the underlying purpose of grammatical constructions. I also agree that Latin poetry beautifully demonstrates this principle. Ovid especially plays with grammar in order to put forth a certain tone and feel, and the two play off each other. The result is captivatingly subtle.
I’m a bit late to this thread, but here’s a case for getting the grammar right. I thought this was amusing.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060806.wr-rogers07/BNStory/Business/home
Perhaps the Clarion instructor meant passive in a general sense and not a gramatical one.
A story filled with sentences filled with lots of “was –ing” is a sure sign of the dreaded ING disease, and the only cure is to cut those out and replace with more active verbs like “The man spotted the bird.”
I always thought that the “eliminate ‘to be’ verb forms” exercise valuable not because it makes for grammatically perfect prose, but because re-writing sentences with a more active verbs makes for better sentences.
Pat, I’m sorry, but you seem to have missed the point. There is nothing wrong with present participles, ie, -ing forms. Progressive tenses show duration, not passivity. This “-ing disease” is an artificial preference elevated into a rule, as one of the commentors above has already said, in fact.
I mentioned Clarion because it seems to be world leader in homogenized prose, but one of the problems with some genre writing is the limited tool set the writers allow themselves. The other big problem comes with dialog. Real people use forms of the verbs “to be” in their speech all the time. (The use of such auxiliaries is one of the distinguishing syntactical marks of English, in fact.)  Eliminating all forms of “to be” leads to the wooden non-speech dialog one sees in a lot of genre writing.
Late addition to the above: I realized that I had too much to say to fit it into a comment so have written another grammar neep post.Â
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Katharine -
I alway preface my diagonosis of the “-ing disease” with the caveat that there is nothing technically wrong with it, but sometimes writers just have too many -ing’s in a paragraph or on a page.
And, to be sure, real people are using “to be” forms all the time when they are speaking, but they are also using lots of “ya knows” and “umm’s” and “err’s.” Should we be including those in the stories we are writing? Ya know what I’m trying to say?
Pat, here’s what makes me think you missed the point:
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There is nothing “passive” about using present active participles. My post centered around misunderstanding what “passive” means.
As far as the “-ing disease” goes, who told you this was a disease in the first place? This is a sincere question, not sarcasm. I’m curious as to where you heard this term.
Katharine-
I first heard about the dreaded “-ing” disease at Critter’s workshop. Can’t remember who gave it the name, but sometimes you see a paragraph just chock full of “ing’s” (like the last para of my last post) and it gives the prose a sing song effect.
But who am I to talk? I love to use run-ons, fragments and neologisms.
As for the “to be” elimination idea, it’s called E-prime, and David Gerrold talks about it in his book Worlds of Wonder. He says:
I don’t quite grok that myself, but that’s the theory.
Pat, thanks very much for that quote.
First of all, this bit is nonsense: “the verb of static existence”. When we are talking about verb forms, “to be” is a syntactical marker. It implies nothing static. Even as a linking verb, its function is equivalence and similiarity, not an indication of stasis.
Here are some random thoughts:
All language “immobilizes” moments in time. That’s what language does. This is why Zen people insist that all language lies.
Things do occur without someone making them occur. This is why all Indo-European languages (and probably those from other language families too) contain impersonal verbs. It rains, il pleut, pluit, maen bwrw glaw, etc etc . . . .
Writers tend to find things that work for them intuitively. Then they try to put reasons these things work into words. I suspect, and this is just my own opininated opinion, that Gerrold is trying to do just that.  It doesn’t mean the theory is going to work for everyone.Â
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static bag…
Hi. Thanks for the good read….