Eddie On Everything » grammar

Throw Your Reader a Rope: Stephen King on the Passive Voice

eddie — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:24:30 +0000

I’m currently reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Though not quite finished, I’d recommend the book to anyone who does even a modest amount of writing in his daily life. The book isn’t a typical “how-to” grammar guide; instead, it reads like a memoir meets wise-old-uncle advice column, mixing anecdotes from King’s life with solid, “here’s how I see it” and “here’s what worked for me” styled writing advice.

I thought the following passage both amusing and informing, and thought I’d share.

Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense. I’m not the only one who says so; you can find the same advice in The Elements of Style.

Messrs. Strunk and White don’t speculate as to why so many writers are attracted to passive verbs, but I’m willing to; I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. There is no troublesome action to contend with; the subject just has to close its eyes and think of England, to paraphrase Queen Victoria. I think unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty. If you find instruction manuals and lawyers’ torts majestic, I guess it does.

The timid fellow writes The meeting will be held at seven o’clock because that somehow says to him, “Put it this way and people will believe you really know.” Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write The meeting’s at seven. There, by God! Don’t you feel better?

I won’t say there’s no place for the passive tense. Suppose, for instance, a fellow dies in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else. The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although “was carried” and “was placed” still irk the shit out of me. I accept them but I don’t embrace them. What I would embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa. Why does the body have to be the subject of the sentence, anyway? It’s dead, for Christ’s sake! Fuhgeddaboudit!

Two pages of the passive voice—just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction—make me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous, as well. How about this: My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun. Oh, man—who farted, right? A simpler way to express this idea—sweeter and more forceful, as well—might be this: My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I’ll never forget it. I’m not in love with this because it uses with twice in four words, but at least we’re out of that awful passive voice.

You might also notice how much simpler the thought is to understand when it’s broken up into two thoughts. This makes matters easier for the reader, and the reader must always be your main concern; without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void. And it’s no walk in the park being the guy on the receiving end. “[Will Strunk] felt the reader was in serious trouble most of the time,” E. B. White writes in his introduction to The Elements of Style, “a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone trying to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.” And remember: The writer threw the rope, not The rope was thrown by the writer. Please oh please.

Which is correct, “Hear, Hear” or “Here, here?”

eddie — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:37:54 +0000

Quick answer: The correct term is “hear, hear.”

The Maven’s word of the day answered this question back in 1998: The shout is hear, hear.

They continue:

The original form of this expression was hear him, which was usually repeated. This imperative was used to call attention to a speaker’s words, and naturally developed the sense of a broad expression of favor.

… As a parliamentary cheer, hear him, hear him! is first recorded in the late seventeenth century and continued into the nineteenth; the reduction to hear! or hear, hear! occurred by the late eighteenth century. However, the use of the verb hear as an imperative meaning ‘listen!’ is older: a notable example is the parliamentary-sounding “Then cried a wise woman out of the city, Hear, hear” (King James Bible, 2 Samuel xx 16).

The Straight Dope agrees:

When you agree with someone, do you say “Here Here!” or “Hear Hear” ? And what does it mean? What is the origin of “Here Here” or “Hear Hear”?

— Tymoma195

The answer: The correct term is, “hear, hear!” It is an abbreviation for “hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say!”

Random Posts

It’s “Toe the Line,” not “Tow the Line”

eddie — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 06:48:47 +0000

“It’s a hard line to tow.”

That’s how the email ended, making me grin ear-to-ear as I pictured the sender pulling a large load with a rope tied around her waist.

The phrase is “toe the line,” not “tow the line.”

It’s an easy mistake to make, as WorldWideWords.org points out:

It’s correctly toe the line, but it is indeed often seen as tow the line, an error that’s all too easy to make when in a hurry. In this case, the association of ideas between tow and line (in the sense of a rope) is often too powerful to overcome, and the lack of any clear mental image of where it comes from is a contributing factor.

Grammartips.com provides some background:

The phrase “toe the line” is equivalent to “toe the mark,” both of which mean to conform to a rule or a standard. The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002; ed. by Glynnis Chantrell) says, “The idiom toe the line from an athletics analogy originated in the early 19th century” (514).