Tuesday, October 24, 2017

pet grammatical peeve

So often, I find that what I want to blog about is one of my pet peeves. And so it is today. I don't know if I've posted this one before, but I just came across it in a book I purchased on Saturday at the Surrey International Writers' Conference. It's one of the for Dummies books, so that might account for this, but I don't think so.

My complaint is this. Many people who have university degrees in such things as creative writing or English literature, seem to think of themselves as experts in English grammar. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.

My bachelor's degree is in linguistics. I took countless courses in literature: English, Canadian, French, French-Canadian, Russian (both classical and Soviet). None of the lit courses qualified me as a grammarian in any of those languages. My expertise (and I believe 40 years of experience does make me an expert) comes from teaching English as a Second Language.

Today, in Writing Children's Books for Dummies, I came across a section in Chapter 7 about creating compelling characters. Page 127, to be exact. The subtitle was "Toss out passivity and indefinites." I'm sure the gist of the advice was very good. My complaint is the constant misuse of the term "passive voice" in books and articles and journals, etc., directed at writers. So many of these people want to toss out the verb "to be" labelling it as "passive". NONSENSE

In The Grammar Book--an ESL/EFL Teacher's Course, by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman (Newbury House Publishers, Inc., Rowley, Massachusetts 01969, USA, 1983) the passive voice is addressed in chapter 17. (That sentence was written in the passive voice.)

Unfortunately, I don't have the most recent edition, so the page number and chapter citation may be different in the newer editions. However, the grammar has not changed. In the second paragraph of the chapter, on page 221, there is this statement (NB, this is not in the passive voice as the Dummies book would have you believe): "...English is a 'subject-verb-object' language and that common alternatives to the S-V-O order are S-O-V and V-S-O." The text goes on to give an example for the active voice." I'll try to avoid direct quotes here as there are some comments that direct the reader to earlier chapters.

The point is this: "John sketched the picture." (Subject John, Verb sketched, Object the picture) is an example of a sentence in the active voice. If we say "The picture was sketched by John." we now have a passive voice sentence. We did this by putting the object in the position of the subject and gave it a form of the verb "to be" which was immediately followed by the past participle of the main verb. We could have left it like that if we didn't want to accuse John of sketching it. However, here we added the original subject as the object of the preposition "by"--thereby creating the typical passive voice sentence. Passives are particularly popular with newspapers and other places where the writer might wish to omit the name of the perpetrator of the action.

Just having a form of "to be" in a sentence does NOT make it passive.
I wish those who pretend to be grammarians would first check with those who truly are.
There. That's my pet peeve for today,

SiWC 2017

Yesterday evening I arrived home after four nights in one of my favourite hotels, Accent Inns in Burnaby.
Unfortunately, I didn't get my dates straight in enough time to fulfill my volunteering obligations, and had to cut down my time at the Surrey International Writers' Conference to only Saturday--missing all of Thursday, Friday and Sunday. However, it was not time wasted.

At the conference, I went into the room I would have to be in for the next workshop in order to introduce that speaker. Luckily, the early workshop was ""The Whirlwind Researcher" presented by Kearsley. Very worthwhile! As was Greg Van Eekhout's "Middle Grade: Beyond the Formula."

After lunch, I tried a workshop on writing short stories, but I was very sleepy and had to leave. So that was it for the conference for me.

Next year, I'll reserve the hotel room sometime before summer for the October conference, and I'll sign up as a participant, not a volunteer.