I’ve been doing some tech writing on the side, and have been advised the phrases “There is” or “There are” are to be avoided. IE, of the following two sentences, the second one is preferred:
There are five main clasifications of undead, with skeletons and zombies the most common.
Skeletons and zombies are the most common of the five main undead classifications.
Makes sense to me - I think the second phrase is more interesting, and flows better.
My question is, is there a grammatical or stylistic term for this? As far as I can tell, both sentences are grammatically correct, but stylistically the second is better. What do you call this “rule”?
The sentence is about classifications of the undead (what the hell kind of tech writing do you do?). It’s easier to follow the second one because the phrase in the grammatical subject position is related to the topical subject.
For nitpickers: yes, I know that “there are” isn’t actually the subject of the first sentence. However, most sentences have their subject in the beginning, so that’s where people expect to find it.
I don’t think either is inherently stylistically superior; it depends on the context. In a paragraph in which you’ve defined the generic concept of undead, and are now proceeding to discuss specific types of undead, the first sentence is preferable, as categorizing the general subject you’ve just discussed into five sub-types which you will proceed to discuss.
In the main, however, the avoidance of “there is/are” constructions is simply for concision, a lack of diffuseness in your writing style. I suspect Ike can attach a specific term to this.
I was taught many moons ago to avoid “there is/are” on the grounds that it lacked style, flair, etc. (Also - “don’t use etc”) I think the teacher’s main idea was to get us to explore different ways of saying the same thing.
For technical writing, surely those of us who are on the receiving end of such material, and are dim when it comes to technical affairs, would prefer it to be as simple and straighforward as possible, with no style at all. We need to know what “is/are” and what “isn’t/aren’t” - nothing else. We’re depending on you, so please stick to the 1st construction
It’s the rule that the active tense is better than the passive tense. Rather than write that something is acted upon by something else, write something acts upon something.
Hmm…you seem to have confused a couple of concepts here. Tense refers to the time in which an action occurred, and both sentences have present tense verbs. In addition, both sentences have active voice verbs. The verb “to be” can never be passive, as it is intransitive.
All things being equal, the second sentence is better, but it’s also nice to vary sentence structure and, though a few minute’s pondering hasn’t provided a good example, in some cases it’s awkard to force a sentence into active voice. I wouldn’t say that one should avoid passive voice, but rather that one should avoid overusing passive voice.
You’re in physics, right? I’ve always been told that the absolute worst thing you could do in a physics class would be to turn in a lab report written in the active voice. The passive voice is very rarely natural, but there are some disciplines in which it is highly favored.
On reflection, that last sentence wouldn’t read very well in the active, would it?
The passive voice is natural, however, when the topical subject of the sentence is what’s being acted upon. Sentences whose topical subjects and grammatical subjects coincide are easier to read than those in which they do not. Or at least that’s what my writing prof. told me, and he’s a really smart guy who’s done research and stuff, so I’m inclined to believe him.
The general rule is that active voice is to be preferred. There may be some types of reports, such as results of experiements, etc., when passive is better. But the OP’s example was not such an exception.
What’s this about “to be” never being in the passive?
“There are six people here.” “Six people are here.” Obviously, the latter is better. The fact that “to be” is intransitive is immaterial to active or passive voices.
I have to disagree. In the passive construction, the direct object of the active verb takes on the role of the subject, and the subject of the active verb takes on the role of the agent. If there’s no direct object, you can’t have a passive voice.
Well, I don’t know how high a priority style is in most physics lab write-ups, but if you read scientific papers, you’ll find a mix of active and passive voice.
“We observed the planet using the Hubble Space Telescope . .” is as common as “The planet was observed using the Hubble Space Telescope. . .” There is also the very awkward but quite common “Some of us ([Last name], [Last name], and [Last name]) continued the observing programme at Kitt Peak . . .” Again, you want to vary your sentence structure, so as to avoid the “What I Did Over Summer Vacation” syndrome: “We did this, then we did that, and we did this . . .” becomes “We observed the planet . . . the images were reduced by flat-fielding and sky-subtraction . . . we found a pronounced discrepency in the plate scale . . . there were five objects available for astrometric calibration. . .”
The journal Nature goes so far as to specify the first-person pronoun “we” and forbid the use of the singular “I”. Most journals don’t get that finicky about style, but Nature corrects I’s to we’s. I guess to avoid that you could rewrite the whole paper in passive voice–but it would sound very stilted and old-fashioned.
ultrafilter, I agree with everything you have said except for one little thing:
That last sentence is not in the passive voice. Passive voice requires a transitive verb.
This is my complaint about MS Word’s spelling and grammar checker. It always flags passive voice. I know passive voice and sometimes it is what I want to use. For example, I prefer to say “I was robbed.” rather than “someone robbed me.” I am more important than some unknown person; it’s all about me.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by DrMatrix *
**ultrafilter, I agree with everything you have said except for one little thing:
You’re contradicting yourself. You said you agreed with ultrafilter with everything except what I snipped, but ultrafilter said the active/passive voices do not appear in sentences that do not have direct objects. (Note how I refrained from using a passive voice.) However, your sentence, “I wsa robbed,” not only does not contain a direct object, but contains a form of the verb “to be.”
As a reader of much confusing technical documentation, I would like to add my two cents worth here.
First of all, passive voice certainly has its place, but I have seen confusing wording, such as “the frammis is fritzed”, in which it isn’t clear if the frammis is in the state of “fritzed”, or if the frammis is becoming fritzed.
Secondly, technical writers need to be very careful about changing the style of their sentences just to avoid repetition. If several very similar items are described with exactly the same words, it may be boring, but it makes it pretty clear that the writer intends to say the same thing about each of them. On the other hand, changing the wording can easily lead the reader to the mistaken idea that there may be differences that do not really exist.
The verb is “rob”, a transitive verb. “Was” is the auxiliary verb used to make the imperfect passive form of the verb “rob”. All passive forms contain a form of “be” as an auxiliary verb. The point is that the verb “rob” is transitive, and so could take a direct object. In the active form of the sentence, “me” is the direct object, which has been converted to the subject in the passive form.
The verb has to take a direct object under normal circumstances. For instance, if I said, “I robbed.”, you probably wouldn’t know what I was talking about unless I gave a direct object. So it’s OK to put that one in the passive voice, and in order to do so, you need a form of the verb “to be”. This is all much clearer in languages that conjugate their verbs instead of using context.
No, I’m not contradictinh myself. The verb is not a form of “to be”. The verb is a form of “to rob”. Specifically, the passive voice. The verb in the sentence “I was robbed” is “was robbed”. “I” is the object of the action. You only see a direct object in the active voice.
[On preview, I see that ultrafilter and Richard have already addressed this]
“Favor” is a transitive verb. In the sentence “I favor my lunch,” ‘my lunch’ is the direct object of ‘favor’. Dictionary.com gives it as transitive as well.
