Sociology, college 101 level. Students were assigned to read Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July and then write a paper analyzing the book in terms of one of the socialization theories we’d presented and discussed with them in class.
Students were explicitly and repeatedly told: this is not a book report. We don’t want a synopsis of what happens in the book in order to be sure you really read it. This isn’t fourth grade.
Students were specifically encouraged: lead off with a declarative point. Assert something about the book as an illustration of theory early on, in the first sentence or at least in the first paragraph, and then develop, explain, and defend it in the rest of your paper.
So in the process of grading, over and over and over and over and over again I circled the very first sentence in the paper, which was “Ron Kovic was born on the fourth of July”, and wrote the following in the margin:
Oh, my goodness! If I only had the opportunity to take a college-level grammar class! Our school doesn’t have one, and I <3 grammar.
I just had to add: My zoology teacher is going to love grading my lab final. Out of not wanting to leave anything blank, I had some random answers to questions. That worm there? I think its class is actually Turbellaria. What’s that structure of the frog? The gallbladder. And that one? Gallbladder. And the next one? Vena cava? (Hah! You thought I’d say gallbladder a 3rd time. Nope; I just put it as 2 answers :p)
But these sentences DO have subjects – the passive voice, the ball, the tennis match, blackjack. The subjects are just not the doers of the actions. But you are correct that passive voice is a handy way to avoid saying who or what is doing the action of the verb.
I teach lower level calculus. My favorite answers are the wonderfully elaborate drawings based on word problems when the student has no idea how to do them.
I’ve gotten detailed illustrations of squirrels running down telephone poles and precise drawings of “square bubble makers” [my favorite fictional product for the semester]. There was also a big, sprawling picture of two boats, about to crash into each other, with captains standing in each bow screaming, with velocity arrows and clocks and fish in the ocean and waves and flags.
My office mate had a student who would draw her a picture of a dinosaur whenever he didn’t know the answer to a question.
There are all sorts of bad algebra habits. But those aren’t nearl so interesting.
My favorite actual problem solution is probably the one that involved labeling a circle’s area “A” and then [inventing from thin air] a right triangle that had a side “A” and using the pythagorean theorem and the area equation in tandem to come up with an answer. ::shakes head::
No, they’re still the object(s), even if they come first in the sentence .
The subject of a sentence does something.
The object of a sentence has something done *to *it.
The passive voice, the ball, the tennis match and blackjack are not doing anything. Rather, they are having things done *to *them: recognition (or not), kicking, winning and playing, respectively.
WhyNot: English sentences are formed in the sequence: subject - predicator - object. In the active voice the subject of the sentence is also the agent (doer of the action). When the recepient of the action takes the first place in the sentence, when forming the passive, it becomes the subject of the sentence. My Collins Cobuild Grammar states that when you want to focus on the reciever of the action “… you make that person or thing the subject of a passive form of the verb.”
Therefore the ball, the tennis match and blackjack are the subjects of those sentences but they are not the agents.
Incubus, if you still have problems with the passive voice, take a good basic journalism course, particularly one that’s aimed at broadcasting students. I haven’t written a sentence in the passive voice in well over a year, much to the delight of my professors.
I’m not a teacher, but I’ve had to do some peer grading, and I had to grade some work that was so truly awful, I wondered how she could function at all, let alone in a communications/journalism program. She’s now the president of the student public relations association.
From Harbrace College Handbook, 12th ed., pp. 5, 6 (bolding in first and last sentences mine):
From Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage, p. 13 (again, bolding mine):
In other words, the very act of changing active to passive voice turns the former object into the subject. (Note that a passive verb does not have a direct object.)
This is true, and no argument will come from me. It would seem, however, that I wasn’t as clear as I could have been in my above post.
I was demonstrating how the subject that is in the active voice sentence could be dropped during the transformation from active to passive, leaving the passive sentence without any clear indication of who or what is performing the action–that is, without the subject of the active voice sentence. “Blackjack is played in Las Vegas” is a syntactically correct sentence, and “blackjack” is indeed its subject (and perhaps this is where I could have been clearer, rather than just leaving it tagged as the object). But the sentence remains in the passive voice and does not tell us that Sue was playing blackjack, as the active voice sentence from which it came did.
So, let me rephrase and add to what I originally wrote upthread:
…you can still have a correct sentence without any indication of who or what is doing the action. The old subject can be dropped, the old object becomes the new subject, and there doesn’t need to be a new direct object, because a passive verb doesn’t need one.
My sister teaches college freshman English, and periodically comes out with some absolute howlers. My most recent favorite was the kid who wrote an analysis of a Maya Angelou poem…but was somehow under the impression that she is a Native American.
He claimed that the images of nature in the poem were important because “Native Americans have historically enjoyed a close relationship with the land,” and that when she mentioned smoke, she was referencing the old Native American system of smoke signals.
I tutored mostly freshmen in English 109 (the lowest English course) this semester. They were mostly good kids who just had basic problems, so it wasn’t too bad. But two essays stick out in my mind.
One student was asked to write a definition essay. She chose freedom. She then went on a long, long rant about all how all the non-Christians in the country should basically shut the fuck up or leave, because Christians have freedom of religion.
Another student needed to write a descriptive essay. She chose sex. And wrote a three page pornographic description of intercourse. I gentley suggested that she choose another topic, so she immediately ran to her professor to “tell on me.” As far as I know, he asked her to choose another topic as well.
