The Passive Voice Is To Be Avoided At All Costs

Perhaps this isn't a common experience, but I certainly grew up hearing from myriad sources, ranging from teachers to inspirational-quotes-for-writers type lists* that anyone wishing to write effectively absolutely must avoid the passive voice.  Scratch out all your to-be's, forget about "was".   Such mainstays of the English language will doom your style to a lifetime of stodgy mediocrity without hope of respite!

Of course, it's not so simple as that.  Teachers, I have come to believe, instil this message in a desperate last gamble to get recalcitrant students to actually think about writing rather than doing the bare minimum so they can move on to whatever else catches their interest.  Despite my own passion for language, I succumbed to this just as often as any jock or hardcore gamer.  Love writing? Sure!  Love writing for English class? If you believe that, I've got a unicorn to sell you.

I can't blame them for that.  It's ridiculously easy to succumb to temptation and write the same basic sentence structure over and over, and, technically, it isn't wrong; it expresses a coherent thought in a properly structured manner that allows for easy interpretation.  However, it's boring.  Every sentence sounds the same.  It's the verbal equivalent of one of those cookie-cutter suburbs where every single house is exactly like every other house, except maybe mirrored or painted a different colour.  Functional, sure - interesting, no.  The viewer rapidly loses interest.

If the viewer is, say, a teacher, and can't just stop reading, they soon find themselves under the influence of a rising urge to leap out a window to escape the mind-numbing boredom.  It's not just that the sentences are all alike; it's that -and this is where the writerly-advice people who aren't teachers step in - that likeness arises from a structure that sets the reader back a pace.

It's important, here, to reflect upon the fact that names (usually) signify something about the object or concept named.  Sentences like "the car was washed by Jason and his little sister"  and "the moors were silvery green shaded with purple sage, stretching into the distance until rising fog obscured them" force the reader to take a step back.  In other words, they make you take a passive role.  You're the observer.  You have to take time to think about the subject of the sentence, rather than the action - the sentence isn't about Jason and his sister washing the car.  It's about the car.

The crux of the matter is that passive voice isn't bad.  It's passive.  And sometimes that's okay.  Despite the Western world's focus on constantly running around doing things, it's healthy to take time to look at the scenery, sit and watch the rain, or otherwise just be.  Similarly, in writing, it doesn't have to be all action, all the time.  That starts to sound exactly the same too, and action loses its excitement.  Also, some sentences just work better in passive voice.

It's the whole verbal contortionism thing.  If you have to convolute that poor sentence into some unholy pretzel of words to avoid the passive voice, then please don't bother.  Otherwise, use your discretion.  If you want to slow the pace, set a scene, create a peaceful mood, feel free to use the passive voice, not to the exclusion of all else, but certainly not solely as a last resort if there's no other way to make the sentence work.  Conversely, if you're aiming to speed up the writing, build tension, or write a fast-paced action scene...yeah, go ahead and avoid the passive voice as much as possible.

* For greater authenticity, insert the expletive of your choice.

What's In a Comma?

A phrase, by any other mark,
would parse as well!

Convoluted attempts at any form of verse aside, I know I've talked about commas before.  Specifically, I got on a spiel about the pros and cons of the notorious Oxford comma, and left it at that.   I blame it on that whole frustrating deal where I keep having faith in humanity, thinking you lot can be trusted with basic punctuation - but no.  I just can't leave you alone for five minutes, or you'll come up with something like THIS:

"Employees must use proper hygiene - come in clean clothes, freshly showered with deodorant."

Let's just take a moment to digest this one.  "Come in clean clothes, freshly showered with deodorant."  According to this sign - displayed at the restaurant where I work on weekends - cooks and waitstaff must wear clothes that are a) clean and b) freshly showered with deodorant.  Even if this wasn't self-contradictory (if you shower something in deodorant, it's no longer clean!  It's covered in friggen' deodorant!) it would make absolutely no sense.  Clothes don't sweat.

What sweats? People sweat.  Well, okay, lots of mammals sweat, but they don't wear clothes or work at restaurants.  Okay, so employees must come to work freshly showered - this makes sense, but - freshly showered in deodorant.  That's disgusting just to think about!  Have you ever gotten that stuff in your mouth?  Ughhh.   And it would cake and scale and itch and...

Deep breaths.  Okay.  I'm all right.

Where were we?  Commas!  Right.  Commas.  All of this - see the above - could have been prevented with a single comma!  See the space between "showered" and "with?"  Just slip a comma in there, and we're good to go, free of bizarre implications.  You must come to work in clean clothes; you must be freshly showered; and you must wear deodorant.

The fact that it was necessary to tell people this is another story, but at least the sentence structure works.  It's really amazing, what a difference one tiny mark can make.  The comma itself is tiny, but it entirely changes the meaning of the sentence; my boss and her husband get a pass, as they're ESL, and self-taught at that, but I know they request native English-speaking employees to double-check anything they write, and we're all college graduates.

This leads to yet another rule of thumb: if you're going to make use of an editor, make sure the editor's competent.  Oh, and, another: if you have any question about a sentence, read it aloud, and if it doesn't make sense, figure out why, change it, and try again.

Do YOU Get in the Fridge?

Sentences are funny.  Not all of them, obviously, nor even most, but rather the definition of sentences as a whole - namely, words put together to express a thought.  This can be a complicated thought with lots of dependent clauses and semicolons and assorted other linguistic shenanigans, or it can be as straightforward as "I like boats."  Either way, there it is; a thought, put to words, or words put to a thought, depending on which way your mental processes work.

The funny part is that while you've definitely taken a thought, and phrased it verbally, and written or spoken those words, it might not say what you want it to.  You can make a perfectly coherent sentence, the other person may hear or read it exactly right, and yet the meaning they get is entirely independent of what you were trying to say.

"Jason washed the car with his little sister" makes sense, in your brain, as a communication that your friend and his younger sibling cleaned the family automobile.  As soon as you say it, though, whoever you're talking to gives you a look as they try to figure out how Jason managed to use his little sister as a sponge without getting kicked in the face and, moreover, why.

In a really stellar personal example, I recently turned to my mother and, gesturing at our newly-acquired kitten, asked "Does he try to get into the fridge with you, too?"

"He might, if I ever got in the fridge!" she answered.  A thoughtful pause ensued before it sunk in that what I'd asked her was not what she'd answered, and commenced snickering helplessly.  The ridiculous thing is that I then proceeded to reword it several times, in various different ways, before landing on one that did not imply that I regularly crawl into kitchen appliances.

Properly-constructed sentences that say something completely off-base are the grown-up cousin of typing the wrong word, and even harder to catch.  In speaking, it's usually not too big a deal, but in writing, it's yet further proof (no pun intended) that double-checking your work is vital to not sticking your foot in your mouth.

If you have time, I'd recommend letting it sit for a few days to a week, then going back and re-reading your work.  To catch errors poses a far easier task if the minutiae aren't fresh on your mind - when you write something, you're transcribing words as your brain arranges them, so you know exactly what you mean.  Three days or a week later, you will have forgotten, and so the odd turns of phrase and the sentences that just don't say what they're supposed to will jump out at you.

If you can't afford time, but you can afford money, can I safely assume you'll hire me?  That would be awesome, you know.  I promise not to laugh if you accidentally inform me that you get in the fridge.

Never Trust a Prefix

One of my favourite aspects of language is the peculiar logic of it.  It's more like architecture than math; while lacking in algorithms and precise, right-or-wrong answers, it does rely on structure - you can build a house of materials ranging from paper to granite, but certain things have to be in place to keep it from falling into a formless heap and, with a base of knowledge and application of sense, you can pretty well figure out what various objects are for.  Language is the same way, with its parts of speech, marks of punctuation, prefixes and suffixes, and so on.

And then, for no apparent reason, it throws you a curveball.  It all makes sense, right up until you get something like "inflammable."  "In-" is a suffix usually meaning "not."  Someone who is insane isn't sane; they might be incoherent, too, because coherency, or intelligible diction, usually comes from a well-ordered mind.  So it seems that, if "flammable" means "readily set on fire," "inflammable" would mean "fireproof."

Except that it doesn't.  Why this is the case I have no idea.  It has, however, held a prominent place in  my awareness since the ripe old age of three, thanks to a family friend and neighbour.   Ray was, and presumably still is, a fantastic person - warm, kind, generous, hard-working, and funny.  She lived next door to us with her husband and two grandsons, aged eight and three, whom she and her husband had taken on after their daughter's mental illness took a turn for the worse.  Having another kid underfoot didn't really seem to bother her, so I spent a lot of time over there, convincing Stephan, the younger grandson, to eat insects.*

Mind Your To's and Two's

Like any self-respecting nerd, I spend a lot of time on the internet.  Since I'm not much of a gamer, a fair bit of this time passes in the noble pursuit of snickering derangedly at the World Wide Web's myriad proofs of what a varied and bizarre world this is.

In other words, I really like funny blogs.  One of my favourites is Cake Wrecks, even if it contributes to my constant desire to eat everything that holds still long enough.  It makes up for this by reliably making me laugh uproariously.  On the other hand, it also reliably kills any tender sprig of faith in humanity, or at least humanity's grasp of basic grammar, that might have sprouted over the week.  Of the repeat offenders, one of the worst is "too/to/two."

Tempting though it might be to say "it's an incompetent baker thing" and leave it at that, it isn't.  This confusion crops up everywhere.  People will advertise their businesses in crowded public spaces using the wrong freaking word!

At least part of the reason for this ubiquitous error, I lay at the door of spell check.  In most regards, it's a life-saver, or at least a dignity-saver and/or coherence-saver.  The exception, as I've previously mentioned, comes up when you type the wrong word.  It's a word! It's spelled right!  It just makes no sense, and spell check, not being actually sapient, can't tell.  The typist, who relies on spell check, in turn doesn't catch the mistake because it isn't red-underlined, annnnd there you go.

What on Earth is a Gife?!: Or, Why Fonts are Important

"Gife Begins in the Garden," proclaims the sign posted in a place of pride in the well-tended flowerbed of a woman whose paper I deliver.  In testament to my stellar observational skills, it somehow took me until yesterday to notice this, whereupon I stood there and stared at it for a good minute and a half while the busily whirring gears of my brain ground to a halt and made weird ka-chunk noises in an attempt to process this.

I couldn't help thinking of my mum's story of her first encounter with a nutria (a very large rodent of South American origins) in Portland; there she sat in her car, overcome with shocked indignation that someone had up and invented an animal and not told her!  That's about how I felt about this.  When had this mysterious word come into being?  Who could be held responsible? Most importantly, what on earth did it MEAN?!  The garden's owner holds some pretty extreme political and religious beliefs on the opposite end of the spectrum from mine.  Perhaps, I thought, it might be some form of jargon, not necessarily political or religious but gardening-related.

Either way, her car's place in the driveway was empty, and besides, its not exactly good form to knock on someone's door just to ask what a sign in their flowerbed means.  At last I resigned myself to mystery, picked up my newspaper bag, and moved on.

Idio(t)ms, Part II

"It's always the last place you look!"

No kidding, Dad.  Once I've found it, whatever "it" happens to be, why on earth would I keep looking for it?  Of course, that's not what the saying means; that's what it says, though.  In all honesty, I would have happily drifted through life never questioning that "it's always the last place you look" means "it's always the last place you think to look," with no need for clarification, if my mother hadn't pointed it out to me.

Evidently, her own dad really wound her up with this sometime in her seventh year of life or thereabouts.  Winding her up is pretty easy - we're talking about a woman whose capacity for indignation extends to the laws of physics.  The sources of her indignation, however, usually make sense, even if they're nothing that any human being anywhere can do a damn thing to change.