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Hard
Times
You
probably remember your English teacher chastisizing you about
using the passive voice, that reverse construction that put
the object of a sentence first (“The ball was hit by Mary”)
rather than the subject (“Mary hit the ball”). It sounds awkward
and weak and stuffy, he or she probably said, if he or she
was inclined to give you explanations.
Your English teacher would probably agree with The Chicago
Manual of Style: “As a matter of style, passive voice
is typically, though not always, inferior to active voice.”
Trust Chicago to be pompous about preferring less pompous
language. It’s better than the style guide that reportedly
included the instruction “The passive voice must be avoided
at all times.”
Now, a sentence in passive voice is not grammatically wrong,
and caring explicitly about avoiding it seems to be one of
those stylistic writing things that is largely a mark of journalists
and language geeks. Indeed, academics seem to go out of their
way to use it as much as possible, probably because it generally
takes more words.
I think the American Chemical Society Style Guide on effective
communication of scientific information (yes, I was copyediting
science articles for a little while) unintentionally gives
us a much more explicit look at why the passive voice gets
used—and why the rest of us might want to care. After an instruction
to use the active voice when it is “less wordy and more direct,”
it goes on to say, “Use the passive voice when the doer of
the action is unknown or not important or when you would prefer
not to specify the doer of the action.”
In science, this feeds into the tendency to treat scientists
as complete objective entities whose expectations, biases,
desires, and habits will have no bearing on the outcome of
what they do or how they analyze the results. This is dangerous.
But in this time of the Great Recession (does that phrase
seem odd to anyone else? If a recession becomes great, doesn’t
that make it a depression? I know there are still arguments
over the technical economic definition, but in terms of nomenclature
it sounds like saying “very kinda bad.”), there’s a classic
phrase that’s going around a lot that makes me think strongly
of those ACS instructions on the use of the passive voice.
“Times
are hard.”
They are. No denying it. The phrase for me first calls up
the emotional strains of the old Stephen C. Foster civil war
song: “It’s the song, the sigh, of the weary. Hard times,
hard times, come again no more.”
It’s also, though, been starting to get under my a skin a
little. It bothers me to hear a construction that seems akin
to “The sky is blue” floating around as the main descriptor
of our economic situation right now. It makes it sound like
it was inevitable, just something that happened, a storm to
be weathered, an accident we all have to grin and bear.
Because it just isn’t. The federal government and the financial
sector led us to this point with specific, intentional and
well-documented dangerous deregulation, speculation, fraud,
predatory behavior, and greed overcoming common sense.
It’s hard to keep that front and center of course. I was amused
to find that in the midst of writing this very column, I first
constructed that key sentence in the last paragraph passively:
“There is a specific, intentional and well- documented trail
of . . . that led us to this point.”
In that case rephrasing was called for, but it’s true that
sometimes we all need a short hand to make our point, and
sometimes our point is other than causal analysis. Sometimes
it is the hard times we’re talking about and not their cause.
If you start every thing you have to say that refers to people
suffering economically with “The bosses/capitalism/Wall Street/theRepubs/the
Dems have screwed them in thus and so way . . .” people very
quickly start to take you for an unsubtle thinker and tune
you out. They might even be right, depending how one note
you are.
And yet perhaps we need to collectively swing a little bit
away from the other extreme where we too often neglect to,
ahem, “specify the doer of the action.” Allowing this financial
crisis to be discussed publicly only as something that “just
happened,” without keeping the focus on the actors and actions
that brought it about will keep us from taking the steps necessary
to keep it from happening again. And our children and their
children would live to regret that deeply.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
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