A few years ago someone in ATEG, I think Brock Haussamen, started collecting teaching tips that he posted on the ATEG web site.  I offered one learning to use passive voice that you can find at http://www.ateg.org/grammar/tips/t7.htm.  It approaches the problem with a little reverse rhetorical engineering.  Give groups of students in a class different forms of the same proposition, an active, a passive, and an agentless passive and ask them to write a story that ends with the particular sentence they were assigned.  I’ve found this stimulates useful discussion of why we use one or another of the forms and how they can be used appropriately.  Note the passive in that sentence.  I’ve found this works better than a prohibition or a grammatical analysis.

 

Herb

 

 

In my business writing and grammar workshops, I strongly suggest avoiding passive voice when a sentence contains all the components of an active sentence.  Those are normally the ones ending in a "by" prepositional phrase.  Since people in the business world are so darn wordy (they tell me it's a habit from trying to fill those 500-word theme requirements), I offer them the challenge of looking to save 50 cents a word for every unnecessary one they use. 

 

So they'd save a dollar by changing the following passive sentence to an active one:

Passive:  The proposal was proofread by the partner.

Active;  The partner proofread the proposal.

 

By the way, the Control F technique works for finding any words students use too repetitiously.  Many struggle with using "that" unnecessarily.  Also, one of my pet peeves is expletives, so I have my participants search for "It" and "There" to identify and then eliminate them.

 

I hope these tips help all of you too.

 

Linda

 

Linda Comerford

Comerford Consulting

317.786.6404

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www.comerfordconsulting.com

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edgar Schuster
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 2:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: past perfect--a final note

Craig may well be right about Orwell's sentiments; however, Orwell himself near the end of his essay offers a set of six "rules" (the word is his).  His fourth rule is "Never use the passive where you can use the active."  He doesn't say "where you can use the active" but not the passive.  But he uses passives in four of the first 15 sentences of "Politics," and it's not at all difficult to substitute actives for each them.
Hurrah for Craig's "we need a more functional orientation to language so that choice can be built on something more than personal or group prejudice."

Ed Schuster


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