Richard Jeffrey Newman

I really enjoyed “Mis­takes Are Made,” by Geof­frey Pul­lum, one of the writ­ers on Lin­gua Franca, one of my new favorite blogs. We just had a whole con­ver­sa­tion in my tech­ni­cal writ­ing class about how to use and not to use the pas­sive voice. I espe­cially appre­ci­ated Pullum’s response to a colleague’s sug­ges­tion that he avoid the pas­sive voice in an obit­u­ary he was writing:

The sec­ond pas­sive my col­league fin­gered was this (which actu­ally has a pair of them): “But all plans were dis­rupted when she was diag­nosed in Decem­ber 2010 with metas­ta­sized and inop­er­a­ble ter­mi­nal can­cer.” The crit­i­cal com­ment was:

Again, this is pas­sive voice. Maybe appro­pri­ate here, I guess, but in gen­eral, I try to avoid the passive.

I was gen­uinely amazed. Am I seri­ously sup­posed to say “But an unex­pected even­tu­al­ity dis­rupted all plans”? And “when an oncol­o­gist named Price diag­nosed her … “?

More gen­er­ally, do the writ­ing tutors of the world really think we should not report that a politi­cian has been shot until we can spec­ify the gun­man? Do they hon­estly think it’s wrong to say that the lights are left on all night in an office build­ing with­out sup­ply­ing a list of the indi­vid­u­als who con­trolled the switches? We really have to get over this super­sti­tious hor­ror about pas­sives. It’s gone beyond a joke.

The end of Pullum’s piece is espe­cially nice, not because of the obvi­ous “gotcha!” he plays on his col­league by count­ing the num­ber of pas­sive con­struc­tions in a book she wrote, but because the fact of the pas­sive con­struc­tions he finds demon­strates that the pas­sive is nec­es­sary. It’s time for the tyranny of the active voice to be brought to an end!

My mother sent me this in an email, though it’s orig­i­nally from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Diary in The New York Times. It so makes me wish the gram­mar course I was sched­uled to teach had not been canceled:

Dear Diary:

While wait­ing for the next shut­tle from Times Square to Grand Cen­tral, I notice an ad for an inter­na­tional bank. The bill­board shows a Joe Six-Pack type on his recliner in front of the tele­vi­sion, can of beer in hand, but has an eco­log­i­cal theme. The cap­tion reads, “Recy­cling one can saves enough energy to power a tele­vi­sion for three hours.”

Directly below the cap­tion, four graf­fiti writ­ers in suc­ces­sion have weighed in, the first chiding:

“1) ‘One CAN save’

“Or

“2) ‘One SAVES.’

“Never ‘One can saves.’ ”

Beneath which, the sec­ond explains:

“They’re talk­ing about an actual can.”

Beneath which, a third comments:

“I love a city where graffiti’s about grammar.”

Beneath which, the fourth adds simply:

“Word.”

–Jeff Honig