As a writer, I’m not entirely sure what my greatest grammatical fault is. It could be that I don’t know enough about grammar to really identify my biggest problems by name; or maybe I’m just average enough in the messing-grammar-up category to fly under the radar of most of my professors. So while I’ll have the rest of the semester to fully examine my weaknesses with a technical eye, for now I’ll focus on one thing I’m sure I need to develop: the use of active voice rather than passive.
My first introduction to the concept of active and passive voice occurred in seventh grade, the same point in time I learned that “grammar” is spelled with two a’s. As far as the lesson went, I remember only that my my teacher said, “Avoid passive voice in your research papers,” and proceeded to mark my drafts with check marks every place I used “was,” “were,” or “had.” She lowered our final grades by a point for each time passive voice was used. I think I got my first C on that paper.
(This learning experience is reminiscent of my very first exposure to the concept of grammar, in second grade, when my teacher asked the class to list the parts of speech. Someone said, eagerly, “Noun!” and so then she asked us what a noun was. I was completely lost for this whole exercise. I’d never heard of a noun, and I didn’t know there was a whole type of word to account for something that was a person-place-or-thing. Fortunately, I finally nailed down the noun thing; unfortunately, I still struggle with active voice.)
I’m sure I can pick out and fix the passive voice in the previous paragraphs, due to the helping verb rule. But I’m not sure if passive voice is simply when a verb is in the past tense, or if it’s a special kind of past tense, or why it even matters--other than to make your writing not “drag” (English 101 at the community college I attended before WSU taught me this).
Furthermore, in what cases does it make a difference? Is active voice always applicable to the situation? Taking the following sentence:
... How would I even make this into active voice? Is it already? This is the dark side of grammar, I’m sure of it. I get so caught up in trying to remember vague rules obscured by time and suspect encoding that I wind up convincing myself that it either doesn’t matter, or I make up some rule to account for why the above sentence would be active. So I just tend to avoid thinking about the whole mess. And people have stopped marking me down, so I just don’t worry about it anymore. Maybe this semester will fix me, once and for all.
My first introduction to the concept of active and passive voice occurred in seventh grade, the same point in time I learned that “grammar” is spelled with two a’s. As far as the lesson went, I remember only that my my teacher said, “Avoid passive voice in your research papers,” and proceeded to mark my drafts with check marks every place I used “was,” “were,” or “had.” She lowered our final grades by a point for each time passive voice was used. I think I got my first C on that paper.
(This learning experience is reminiscent of my very first exposure to the concept of grammar, in second grade, when my teacher asked the class to list the parts of speech. Someone said, eagerly, “Noun!” and so then she asked us what a noun was. I was completely lost for this whole exercise. I’d never heard of a noun, and I didn’t know there was a whole type of word to account for something that was a person-place-or-thing. Fortunately, I finally nailed down the noun thing; unfortunately, I still struggle with active voice.)
I’m sure I can pick out and fix the passive voice in the previous paragraphs, due to the helping verb rule. But I’m not sure if passive voice is simply when a verb is in the past tense, or if it’s a special kind of past tense, or why it even matters--other than to make your writing not “drag” (English 101 at the community college I attended before WSU taught me this).
Furthermore, in what cases does it make a difference? Is active voice always applicable to the situation? Taking the following sentence:
“I’d never heard of a noun, and I didn’t know there was a whole type of word to account for something that was a person-place-or-thing.”
... How would I even make this into active voice? Is it already? This is the dark side of grammar, I’m sure of it. I get so caught up in trying to remember vague rules obscured by time and suspect encoding that I wind up convincing myself that it either doesn’t matter, or I make up some rule to account for why the above sentence would be active. So I just tend to avoid thinking about the whole mess. And people have stopped marking me down, so I just don’t worry about it anymore. Maybe this semester will fix me, once and for all.
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