T, you always leave me rolling on the floor with your descriptions of
language issues!
I didn't see a problem with the "victim" example - youngest/smallest
children are often vulnerable.
However, I do frequently run into a problem where two current
grammatical shibboleths occur at the same time:
1) The passive voice must be avoided at all times.
2) I must not overuse the first-person pronoun "I," lest I appear to
be centered on myself.
Now, when I'm trying to write a bulleted narrative describing all the
steps that I took to resolve a problem, each of which is several
sentences in length, it's a real challenge. Should I write (as
artificially short examples):
* I examined the data to ensure that the table was empty before I
initialized it with the good data. (bad - uses "I") or The table
was examined to ensure it was empty before being initialized with the
good data. (bad - has a passive)
It's not overwhelming in a single sentence, but when you get a long
series of them, either choice begins to stick out like a sore thumb.
And alternating between them sounds really stupid, almost as bad as
switching to non-parallel verb forms in the same sentence...
When the individual items are really short, the conundrum can be
resolved by saying, "I performed the following steps"
1. examined the data.....
That isolates the "I" in one spot, and allows all the verbs to be
active. But it truly doesn't work if each item is a paragraph or two
long!
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Martha Krieg [EMAIL PROTECTED] in Michigan
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