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RE: Active versus passive (WAS Displays versus Appears-Which One? )
Subject:RE: Active versus passive (WAS Displays versus Appears-Which One? ) From:"Dick Margulis" <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 19 Dec 2000 10:50:51 -0500
Folks,
On this list are people of various ages and from various parts of the United States and the rest of the world. Some of the younger participants may have had teachers who themselves are younger than some of us fogeys by a decade or two or three.
Somewhere along the way, the fashion in English instruction swung away from prescriptive grammar. In some states, the teaching of grammar was essentially forbidden, in favor of something called Whole Language Instruction, which two generations have now been subjected to.
So while some of us understand that "voice" is a technical characteristic of verb usage that has two possible values called "active" and "passive," others of us were never exposed to such instruction and therefore hear those terms in some vague, non-technical context and have no idea what the rest of us are talking about. They surmise, incorrectly, that an intransitive copulative verb is a passive verb, or perhaps that anything that happens when the subject is sitting down is a passive verb. Many of them are not sure what a subject is.
The problem is one of vocabulary development. I have no problem with the modern linguistic notion of generative grammar. But when writers want to discuss sentence structure, we need words to talk about the concepts; and we all need to be working from a common definition of each of those words.
Otherwise, we just write what "sounds right" with no ability to discriminate what sounds right to the writer from what sounds right to the reader. In our multicultural world, though, norma loquendi is hard to pin down. Norma has left the building, in other words; so we might better return to the notion of standard diction. That requires, perhaps, that people actually learn the vocabulary needed to discuss grammatical questions.
Just my .02
Dick
Marguerite Krupp wrote (clearly and correctly):
>
>What really differentiates the passive voice from the active is the
>following:
>
>* In the active voice, the subject is the DOER of the action: "I unplugged
>the computer." In the context of this discussion: "The system displays an
>error message...." or "An event message appears on the screen."
>
>* In the passive voice, the subject is the RECEIVER of the action: "The
>computer was unplugged by me."
>
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