Avoiding passive for dummies
Diane Steele, publisher of the Dummies series (over a thousand titles
beginning with
DOS for Dummies
in 1991), explains to Rachel Donadio ("Dumbing Up" in the NYT
Book Review, 9/24/06, p. 31) how
the books are put together:
The editorial team, based in
Indianapolis, gives authors a kind of "Dummies for Dummies" manual and
a computer template. "Copy editors do the line editing and
Dummifying," Steele said. "It's a word we use to talk about how
to make text comply with our style guide." The approach is
strict. "We address the reader as you -- you can, next you do
this -- we don't talk about we," she said. "We try to be funny,
or at least lighthearted." Furthermore, Steele said: "We don't
use future tense, we don't use passive voice, we don't have long
chapters. A 26-page chapter is getting pretty long."
Yes,
Avoid
Passive. (Also Avoid
We
and Avoid Future, which we haven't discussed here.) But sometimes
you really want a passive.
According to Steele, Dr. Alan Rubin, author of
Diabetes
for Dummies
said he had some friendly discussions
with his editors about the passive-voice rule. "Sometimes I'll
write something like 'the patient was comatose and was given thyroid
hormone,' and they'll change that to 'the patient was comatose and took
thyroid hormone,' " Rubin said. "I have to tell them these are
extremely sick patients, they can't take care of themselves, they have
to be passive whether Wiley likes it or not."
Ok, the patient was passive (comatose, in fact), but does the sentence
have to be? (Yet another demonstration of why the technical term
passive is not such a great
choice.) Of course not. It could be recast as something
like "the patient was comatose, so the doctor gave her/him thyroid
hormone", though that's longer and also introduces the doctor as an
important participant in the story. There are ways we -- oh,
sorry, you -- can avoid passive and keep the sentence short: "the
patient was comatose and got thyroid hormone". The VP "got
thyroid hormone" in this version is not passive in form, true, but it
also takes subjects denoting a recipient, rather than an agent, so if
you dislike the passive because you want agentive subjects, this
version won't really make you happy. But then "was comatose"
doesn't take agentive subjects either, and it's hard to see how you
could convey the coma information with a VP that takes agentive
subjects; you can devise non-copular VPs -- "lapsed/fell into a coma",
for instance -- but their subjects denote affected persons rather than
agents. (Deliciously, a fairly standard technical term for an
affected participant in an event is
patient.
Yes, "lapsed into unconsciousness" and "fell sick" are VPs taking
patient subjects.)
This would be a good time to remind readers that the advice literature
is inclined to confuse syntactic functions (like
subject and
direct object) and participant
roles (like
agent and
patient). Granted, the world
would be simpler if you could get right from syntax to meaning -- if,
say, subjects always denoted agents in events -- but this is very much
not the world we live in, and we just have to get used to working with
two different sets of concepts and separate sets of terminology.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 25, 2006 11:01 AM