The Passive Voice Discussed by Someone Other Than Me.

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy has two worthwhile posts about the passive voice. Enjoy:

“The supposed sins of the passive voice (part 1 — misidentification)”

and

“The supposed sins of the passive voice (part 2 — when the passive voice is better than the active, or at least as good)”

I agree with most everything in these two posts, but I want to stress two things. First, as Volokh says:

It seems . . . that passive voice is indeed often bad, for three reasons: (1) It tends to be less engaging, (2) it usually adds a few more words and some extra grammatical complexity, and (3) it sometimes obscures who’s actually doing something. “The dog was bitten by the man” is an example of passive voice bringing less verve, and requiring more words, than the active. “Mistakes were made” is the cliche example of passive voice as obfuscation or barrier to analysis.

Second, the most important point, the one I stress every time I talk about the rules of English with my students, is this: You are the boss of your writing. You’re in charge. Thus, you can break any rule in A Writer’s Reference if you do it purposefully and intelligently.

On another note, I must stand up for Strunk and White The Elements of Style*. Volokh quotes Geoff Pullum of Language Log, who casts a disparaging word in the direction of the little book or at least its advice on the passive voice (though, having read Pullum’s post before, I know he’s not a fan of the entire book). I disagree for two reasons.

First, the book lays out grammar and punctuation in an engaging style, one that will hold the reader’s interest from start to finish, unlike most books on grammar and punctuation. And because the reader will actually read the book, she will come away knowing much more than she would had she bought a thicker, boring guide, one of those “longer, lower textbooks–books with permissive steering and automatic transitions.”

Second, as I’ve written elsewhere, The Elements of Style is worth all the other grammar and usage guides if only to read and re-read the introduction. Strunk’s advice to “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!” ring in my ear every time I write or revise. Oddly, Pullum criticizes even this advice. He’s wrong, of course. Writers–student or otherwise–need constant reminders to omit needless words, even when they know which words are needless.

White’s paragraph describing the reader as “a man floundering in a swamp” is a description of audience I use again and again to help my students understand their job as writers. And so, contra Mr. Pullum, I recommend you get “the little book”!

*For reasons I outline here, I prefer the 3rd edition to the 4th.

Sexist Language Police Abuse Author of Charlotte’s Web

One of my favorite essays on writing is E.B. White’s  essay “Will Strunk” that first appeared in The New Yorker on July 27, 1957, according to Wikipedia, and later as one of the many essays that made up the Essays of E.B. White, my first introduction to the great stylist. A slightly different version of the essay later became the introduction to Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, White’s revision and update of Strunk’s “little book” by the same name.

White revised the essay a bit with each edition of the book. In the first edition, the essay begins,

A small book arrived in my mail not long ago, a gift from a friend in Ithaca. It is The Elements of Style, by the late William Strunk, Jr., and it was known on the Cornell campus in my days as “the little book,” with the stress on the word “little.”

In the second edition, the first paragraph of the essay begins differently and ends on a new note of information:

At the close of the first World War, when I was a student at Cornell, I took a course call English 8. My professor was William Strunk, Jr. A textbook required for the course was a slim volume called The Elements of Style . . . It had been privately printed by the author.

The third edition begins like the second. It’s not until the 4th paragraph that White revises the essay, telling readers what changes they’ll find in this new edition. He even  admits that some

amplification has reared its head in a few places in the text where I felt an assault could be made on the bastions of brevity . . .

And this was all fine and good because E.B. White was in control, and it was his essay after all. But then came the fourth edition, the teal and silver version, where the sexist language police took over and revised the “little book” to include a

light redistribution of genders to permit a feminine pronoun or a female farmer to take their places among the males who once innocently served [White].

Fair enough. I’m all in favor of feminine this and thats, female doctors and department chairs. But, dear editor, in that introductory essay, please step away from the feminine gun and let classic essay live on, just the way White wrote it. Sadly, the editors didn’t ask my opinion, and hogwash ensued.

Here is the offending (and my favorite) paragraph as it originally appeared in The New Yorker and as it was repeated in the first three editions of White’s version of the “little book”:

All through The Elements of Style one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering in the swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain the swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least through him a rope.

The image is perfect, the lesson important, and both stick in the reader’s mind–at least they have stuck in mine. They’ve stuck so firmly in my mind and helped me so much in my writing that I read that short paragraph to my writing students each semester in the hope of impressing those same lessons on their minds. But there are a couple of problems with that paragraph, problems that apparently bugged the sexist language police. Did you spot them?

All through The Elements of Style one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering in the swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain the swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least through him a rope.

A man. His man. Him! As a general rule, we want to avoid sexist nouns and pronouns. We want both male and female to be represented on the printed page. We want the dear reader to know that women can be doctors and men nurses. As a father of two daughters, grandfather to soon-to-be three granddaughters, and father-in-law to two daughters-in-law, I agree with that proposition. But every time and always? Is there never an exception to that dictate? You be the judge. Here’s how that formerly great little paragraph appears now in the fourth edition, the one edited by someone with a tin ear. See if you can catch the changes.

All through The Elements of Style one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in the swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain the swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least throw a rope.

“Man” is gone. “His man” is no more. “Him” is a mere memory. And to what effect? In the original version, White compares the reader to “a man floundering in the swamp.” In the new version, that comparison is gone. Instead we have the reader compared to a reader, albeit, a reader floundering in the swamp. No wonder s/he’s floundering. Put the book down for  hell’s sake, at least until you get out of the swamp! Who reads in the swamp anyway?

And if you–the person attempting to write English–can’t manage to drain that swamp, the revised version advises you to simply “throw a rope”! To whom? a careful writer might ask.

The editor attempting to revise the English in the fourth edition apparently felt it was better to bow to the sexist language police than to make sure that you–the writer–throw the rope in the general direction of the reader, the one floundering in the swamp, the one with the book in his or her hands. (And how is s/he going to catch the rope, book in hand and all? The problems with this passage mount.)

To make matters worse, the editors of the fourth edition failed to mention that they had changed this timeless essay to reflect their preferences rather than White’s. In fact, in a footnote at the bottom of the first page of the Introduction, they essentially lie to the now floundering writer, “E.B. White wrote this introduction for the 1979 edition.” That statement is wrong on so many levels, I won’t take the time to list them.

But I will take some liberties with the text. If the editors care so little about White’s essay, I figure it’s ok for me to tell you–my readers–to buy the “[third edition of] the little book” rather than the fourth and to remember this lesson: Cultivate an an ear for sexist language, but don’t be a mindless slave to the idea.

Edited to improve flow and clarify.