Hi. Thanks for the good read….

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. 

 

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:

” . . .Eliminating the verb of static existence makes it impossible for the author to assign arbitrary qualities to things. It keeps the writer from immobilizing moments in time. He or she can no longer use language to create those specific lies of meaning, and must instead work in a more dynamic world in which things occur because someone or something makes them occur—a world in which things change with the observer.”

I don’t quite grok that myself, but that’s the theory.

Perhaps the Clarion instructor meant passive in a general sense and not a gramatical one

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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.

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?

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. 

 

 

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.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060806.wr-rogers07/BNStory/Business/home

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.

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”.