De facto English

There is a particular piece of writing advice that I hear fairly often.  I don't know exactly when the idea was started.  I don't remember hearing it as a youth in school, but I have heard it often since the 1990s.  The movement started in Texas, called the New Jersey Writing Project in Texas, perpetuated it over a 20 year period, so it affected a great many teachers and their students.  The advice?  Limit or eliminate the use of the verb "to be" by writing more active verbs.  And the corollary is to write active verbs not passive ones.

When I first heard the advice, I thought it might have some wisdom behind it, so I tried following it.  But, fortunately, I was able to learn more and more about language in its various aspects, and began noticing that there was no wisdom to the advice.  Speech, which requires generating words using split second reasoning, uses stock phrases and redundancy of phrasing.  Thus, identifying and describing nouns after they are introduced (predicate nominatives and predicate adjectives) is a common strategy in conversation.  In writing, the immediacy of needing to develop thought disappears.  However, the need to identify and describe (or modify) doesn't disappear.  So, why would someone think limiting the use of "to be" would be a good idea?

After more contemplation and experience with those who teach writing, I think the notion began by teachers not fully understanding the use of the passive voice in English.  It is a very useful technique in a language's arsenal of expressions.  English is only one of many languages, modern and ancient, that have used the passive.  So, ignoring the use of the passive defies the logic of many peoples across the time continuum.  But, English teachers without training in grammar theory explain passive only as an alternative to the active.  The passive wording is a little lengthier than the active wording, so to a teacher who emphasizes economy of words in writing, it would seem more logical to use the shorter version of the idea.  Also, teachers like emphasizing the underlying structure of English to be SVO (subject-verb-object), which favors the use of an active verb.

So, it is the case of Pope's aphorism beginning with "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing..." that has characterized the reason for rampant misinformation.  There are three underlying structures to English logic, not one - SVO, SV, SVA,  (Subject-Verb-Agent, the sentence structure for passive voice).  And while SVO might dominate, albeit under 50% of most people's writing, and well under 50% of most people's speech, plenty of important ideas are expressed with the other two alternatives.

And, it is the Pope aphorism that explains why people need to rely on some extremely arbitrary notion.  Because passive voice is not understood as a bigger part of the language, it is targeted for elimination or restriction.  And, because the passive voice is very often confused for a nonpassive predicate adjective sentence construction, eliminating and restricting the use of forms of "to be" (because it is the common denominator of the two types) save teachers' faces, keeping their lack of understanding from showing.

It reminds me of the poem, For Want of a Nail.  Fortunately, language is larger than English class and very few people pay attention to elaborations of grammar.  While people may remember a teacher saying something about not writing forms of the verb "to be," they won't remember the rationale, so they continue to use the predicate nominative, predicate adjective, and passive voice constructions.

Power to the people who have ignored advice that merely saves face for a group of people who don't want to fully understand what they are teaching.  The people's way is the de facto English.  I love it when that happens.