Category: English language

Google’s Bad Voice

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Google has a style guide for technical writers and from what I’ve read, it’s pretty good. It’s short and sweet on the details, but that’s fine. The guide is direct and it’s not meant as a general writer’s guide.

But it makes comments on the passive voice, so you can probably guess what’s coming.

First, the good stuff. The guide correctly identifies the passive voice. Progress! The guide doesn’t identify all the ways that the passive voice can appear, just the BE + past participle way, but it gets that way right. Good job, Google.

Then the guide gives advice that writers should use the active voice instead of the passive voice. This is where Google’s guide makes some questionable claims. It says:

I have never heard about that first bullet point. How do they know that people convert sentences in their head? How could they even know? If Google has that kind of technology, they need to give it to linguists. It would answer a lot of questions in our field.

I guess we could say that active voice is the default or canonical way of forming a sentence in English, but this is a categorical decision made to aid grammatical analysis. We don’t know whether people mentally convert passive voice to active voice. Do they do that with other types of clauses? Do they convert questions or imperatives? What about the middle voice – do they convert those clauses too? Probably not.

Passive voice does not necessarily obfuscate ideas, nor does it turn sentences on their head. You can obfuscate sentences with the passive voice, but you can also do that with the active voice. Lazy writers like to scapegoat the passive voice for obfuscation, but smarter people know better. Check it: which one of these sentences would you say is the most obfuscatory?

Maggie Simpson shot Mr. Burns.

Someone shot Mr. Burns.

Mr. Burns was shot.

I would say the middle one is the most unclear, but it’s in the active voice. The third sentence, which is the passive one, doesn’t tell us who shot Mr. Burns, but there’s a reason that people write sentences like that. Because sometimes one element is more important than the other. We’ll get to this more in a bit, but for now, consider:

Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy.

President John F. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.

President John F. Kennedy was shot.

Not for nothing, the passive voice sentence is the shortest one here. But more importantly, President Kenndy is more important than the person who shot him!

Let’s keep the third bullet point in mind while we look at the next piece of advice.

The Google Technical Writing Manual says

The Google Technical Writing Manual then takes some digs at academic writing (in a section marked “optional”):

So they start off with a swipe at “certain scientific research reports”. But which ones? I thought we were supposed to be joining “the quest for clarity” smh. Let’s think about this for a minute though. If the passive voice is used more often in scientific publishing, could there be a reason for that? Look again at the example sentences the Google manual gives:

  • It has been suggested that…
  • Data was taken…
  • Statistics were calculated…
  • Results were evaluated…

They claim that we don’t know who is doing what to whom, but with the exception of the first example, this is clearly not true. When a research report says “Data was taken…,” we know who took the data. It was the researchers! The authors of the research report, they took the data! Why on earth would it be anyone else? And if it was, the authors would say that. “Statistics were calculated…,” “Results were evaluated…” The authors are calculating the statistics and evaluating the results. That’s how research reports work. And the statistics and results are more important than the authors. That’s the objectivity in scientific research that the Google manual is clamoring for. Neither the active voice nor the passive voice versions of these examples is more or less objective:

  • Active: We took the data… vs. Passive: Data was taken…
  • Active: We calculated the statistics… vs. Passive: Statistics were calculated…
  • Active: We evaluated the results… vs. Passive: Results were evaluated…

If the author(s) of this Google manual weren’t so hung up on hating the passive, they would notice that three of their four examples sentence disprove their point. Instead they just look silly.

So let’s edit the advice from the Google manual for clarity and truth:

Do we know who is doing what to whom? No Yes. Does the passive voice somehow make the information more objective? No, but neither does the active voice.

Read a book, Google

Look, here’s what’s really going on. It’s not about being bold, or who is doing what to whom, or any of that. It’s about the way English works. Huddleston and Pullum explain:

In English there is a broad preference for packaging information so that SUBJECTS REPRESENT OLD INFORMATION. […] while [active and passive clauses] normally have the same core meaning, they are NOT FREELY INTERCHANGEABLE. They differ in how the information is presented, and one important factor in the choice between them concerns the status of the two major NPs as representing old or new information. (2005: 242-243)

You can’t just switch every passive clause into an active one. You will sound strange. Because you will be disobeying the rules of English. The quote above is from a book called A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. This is basic stuff. But it does require that the writers of the Google Technical Writing Guide read a book about grammar before making proclamations about it. And that’s asking too much, I guess.

Positive “anymore”

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

I recently heard from an old friend who had stumbled upon my website. He said he was shocked when he read this line from my bio:

My family says that anymore at the end of the last sentence sounds wrong, but it’s all good.

This line piqued his interest because he also puts anymore at the ends of sentences, but his wife doesn’t – even though she grew up somewhat close to where he did. And she has commented about how his family does it as well. My website made him think that maybe this wasn’t something that only his family said. And indeed he’s right! It’s called “positive anymore” and there are millions of English speakers that say this. But there are also many millions more who do not, so they may notice it when they hear someone say it.

There’s a Wikipedia page on the topic – which doesn’t do a great job explaining things, so let’s try to do better.

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More misidentified passives

Joe McVeigh3 Comments

But this time it’s… on purpose? What?!

Yesterday, Benji Smith became the main character on Writer Twitter. It turns out that Mr. Smith has created a database of novels that he obtained through probably illegal means. Smith used this database in his Prosecraft project, which published statistics about each novel, such as its word count, the number of adverbs in each, and something called the “vividness” of the writing style (I’m not really sure what that means and Smith doesn’t provide a good definition). He was also using this database to promote his word processor program Shaxpir 4, which is why he’s almost certainly breaking the law.

But one of the other things that he claims to analyze is how many passive verbs are in the novels. And Smith has a very interesting (aka “bad”) definition of “passive voice”.  

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George Packer and the Atlantic’s sad defense of inequity

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Content warning: This post is about harmful language and it contains words that are used to dehumanize people. Please take caution.

In April 2023, the Atlantic published a 2,500-word opinion piece complaining about language equity style guides. The attack on these guides is misleading, wrong, and harmful. It continually misrepresents the style guides. It shows a misunderstanding of the content and the point of them. It refuses to accept others and expresses contempt for anything that doesn’t fit the author’s narrow and outdated idea of language. And it gives fuel to the fascists in their culture war.

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Dr. Andrew Thomas tries to mansplain mansplaining

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

Is this dude about to mansplain mansplaining? Hoo boy. Here we go.

This is going to be a long post. I’ll go through each part of the article with my usual irreverence, but don’t be fooled. Thomas’s ideas about language are a real danger to women. So I’ll comment seriously on that as well. Let’s get to it.

tl;dr – Andrew Thomas is incredibly wrong about mansplaining. He cites no sources to back up his claim that men and women have different communication styles, except for one limited study from 40 years ago. Modern linguistic research disproves Thomas’s ideas, and in fact his ideas are about 50 years out of date. Mansplaining is one part of systematic discrimination that women face. Thomas tries to water down the meaning of mansplaining. Thomas’s ideas are dangerous because they will be used to silence and exclude women in society.

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Some of Noah Webster’s spelling changes haven’t happened yet!

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If you learn about attempts at spelling reform in English, you’re bound to come across Noah Webster’s suggestions. Webster is considered the grandfather of American English since he had such a profound influence on it in the early days. His Blue-backed speller (basically a school grammar book) went through 385 editions and sold 60 million copies. Holy cow! And his dictionary? Well, that old thing is still being updated and it still has his name on it.

Some of Webster’s spelling reforms stuck. He’s the reason US English doesn’t spell honor, color or neighbor with a u. But others not so much. He suggested spelling women as wimmin. I’m sure he meant well, but try saying that out loud and not sounding like a person who definitely doesn’t like women. He suggested korus for chorus and dawter for daughter. You can see the idea behind these suggestions – they simplify the relationship between sound and spelling. The only reason they look wrong or strange to us is because they didn’t catch on. We learned that daughter was spelled with “augh” instead of “aw” and so everything else looks rong (or “wrong”).

And that brings us to another one of Webster’s suggestions that didn’t catch on… or didn’t catch on yet! In a similar fashion to korus and dawter and honor and color, Webster suggested that we spell machine as masheen. Looks fine to me! But of course, we all know that no one spells it that way. And that’s because we’re still in the first century of the millennium. We’re going to have to wait another 500 years for the spelling of machine to change to masheen.

Because that’s exactly how it’s spelled in the movie Idiocracy. (Spoiler alert for a movie that came out over 15 years ago.) The plot takes place in the year 2505. At the end of the movie, the protagonist is taken to a theme park ride called the “Time Masheen”:

The Time Masheen, a theme park ride in the movie Idiocracy (2006)

I’m sure the director Mike Judge was having fun here – or maybe he’s a lexicography buff and he was tipping his hat to ol’ Noah. I know that this spelling of masheen is supposed to show how stupid people have become in the future, but spelling reform is actually a good idea. Some argue that spelling reform will have to happen sooner or later in English, especially as we get further away from the current spelling of words due to sound shifts, so why not now? And there’s the fact that our antiquated spelling system makes learning unnecessarily difficult. But there are other problems associated with spelling reform, such as choosing which variety of English to base the spelling on when there are so many different varieties. Food for thought.

Check out some more of Webster’s suggestions in an article by Arika Okrent for The Week. Merriam-Webster has a post about other spelling reforms that never caught on (including masheen). And the podcast Word Matters, which is hosted by editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, has an episode where they discuss the history of Noah Webster’s monumental work on his dictionary. In that episode they talk about exactly why masheen never caught on – hint: Noah was bamboozled by his editors!

How NOT to talk about language change

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

A New York Times article from 1977 article rolled across my screen recently (courtesy of Mark Harris). It concerns language change and boy is it a doozy. The article asked members of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel to give their comments on some recent developments in English. Let’s take a look.

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The meaning of “Would you rather have unlimited bacon but no more video games or games, unlimited games, but no more games?”

Joe McVeigh8 Comments

I was recently asked about the meaning of the phrase

Would you rather have unlimited bacon but no more video games or games, unlimited games, but no more games?

On first glance, this phrase may not seem to work (and it kind of doesn’t – more on that below), but it gets used around the internet and people understand it. So that means it does work. What gives?

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Watch your grammar, young padawan

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

(Or something more Star Wars-y. Sorry, I’m a different kind of nerd.)

You have to be careful out there with posts on the interwebs about grammar. Case in point: this Medium post that showed up when we were doing a search in class. It ties in to some of my recent posts. The post is called “Yes, Yoda’s Grammar is Technically Correct” and overall it’s correct. Yoda’s grammar is fine (if a bit stilted). The grammar in this post though… not so much.

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Google doesn’t know what a Direct Object is

Joe McVeighLeave a comment

After my recent discovery that a whole ton of sites online don’t know what a Subject is, I couldn’t resist looking at their idea of what a Direct Object is. Surprise! They get that one wrong too. And for almost exactly the same reasons. Womp womp. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

So if grammar is something that interests you and if actually want to be right about it, read on to learn what a Direct Object is – and also what it is not.

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