On Feb 13, 2006, at 23:05, Martha Krieg wrote:
T, you always leave me rolling on the floor with your descriptions of
language issues!
Always happy to be of service :)
I didn't see a problem with the "victim" example
No? Let me quote it again:
"As the smallest child in the family of 5, her brothers often made her
the victim of their practical jokes"
- youngest/smallest children are often vulnerable.
I do not question the truth of that. And I do understand what the
sentence is *supposed* to mean. All the same, it's a badly constructed
sentence, which doesn't "hang together".
"As the smallest child in the family of 5" is a clause -- an almost
sentence -- but it's also the subject, which could be substituted by a
single word: "she". Now, put it together with the rest of the sentence,
and you get:
"She, her brothers often made her a victim[...]" Does it make sense?
No. There's no "agreement" between the beginning and the end, because
the subject changes; it's "she" at the beginning, and it's "they" (the
brothers) at the end.
You can also "test" a complex sentence (or a complex phrase) by
reversing the order:
"Her brothers often made her a victim [...], as a smallest child etc".
It still rubs the wrong way...
I should be either:
"As a smallest child in the family of 5, she was often the victim of
her brothers' practical jokes"
or else:
"Her brothers often made her the victim of their practical jokes,
because she was the smallest child in the family of 5".
In the first sentence, "she" remains the subject throughout, even if
she's in passive form grammatically as well as being a passive object
of her brothers' agression. You could eliminate the entire introductory
(less important) clause and lose only an "explanatory frill".
The second sentence is a compound one and has two -- equally important
-- subjects, joined together by "because". "They" are the subject of
the first part, "she" is the subject of the second part.
Which of the two sentences you used in a story would depend, entirely,
on where you wanted your spotlight to focus. But the original one seems
to focus on her at first then shift the focus to the brothers and does
it sloppily. IMO, of course, which isn't end-all, being as I'm a
foreigner and a dumb Polack to boot :)
The substitution and the reversal as tools for understanding grammar
was something I didn't learn until I was at the U, but, for me, it
worked much better than any amount of parsing and diagramming. OTOH, I
happened to hit the U when a lot of the old ideas were being tossed out
and the "new idols" were "spoken", "context vs paradigm", etc.
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.
A very sad (not to mention artificial) dichotomy. Passive voice may be
(indeed is) less interesting than active voice. But active voice goes
right back to a "yawn" (if not to a "pompous ass"), when stripped of
personality (again, that's my personal opinion). Use both --
judiciously -- and your text's that much richer.
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)
I've had to write a "pompous ass" (bad - uses "I") paper only once in
my life -- my Master's thesis -- and hated it. Would have hated it even
more, if I hadn't already been on my "grace period extension" and had
had more time to ponder the idiocy of it... :) It's *supposed* to make
the paper sound... What's the word, what's the word... Means "taking no
sides"... *Objective*! But, in fact, it only makes it stiff and
dis-associated. It also -- IMO -- dis-allows disagreement and curtails
discussion, however subtly. You can argue with an "I" (a personal point
of view) easily, but it's much harder to argue with a ponderous,
God-like statement...
As soon as I was out of the U, I never again wrote that way; I'd much
rather be (or try to be) objective in fact than in form. And, if my
irrepressible-self pops out at every corner, announcing it's *me*
writing, not some Martian robot? Tough.
I've always preferred reading fiction to reading "learned papers" and
always assumed that most others do too, which is why I write the way I
write ("I" 5 times in every sentence) and have no intention of
changing... :)
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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