Sigh. Gudere* strikes yet again. I left out the asterisked comment above.
Daniel
- In an (apparently futile) effort to appease Gudere’s law, I figure you should spell it like that. Sort of a sacrifice to the snarky god of proofreading.
Sigh. Gudere* strikes yet again. I left out the asterisked comment above.
Daniel
Only when it’s being used as an attributive adjective (“Anal-retentive asshole Zenster ranted.”) The predicate adjective form (“Zenster is anal retentive.”) is, of course, hyphen-free.
::reads Daniel’s hard-core grammar check post::
Whew! Stop it! You’re turning me on!
Okay, nobody look at the misspelling in the title line in my previous post. I’m a professional, folks. Really.
Also, the fragment in the first original paragraph is intentional, but the period (which I left out as a seek-and-find challenge for the reader) should follow the word “adjective.”
This is not about a single error in a post. This is not (so much) about grammar. This is about blatant misspellings and ridiculous mis-wordings.
Those of you wasting your time parsing my entire post must have dangerous quantities of spare time.
I couldn’t care less what you think of my writing style. Many others praise me for it and your brickbats mean doodley-squat. I’m confident most of you know what I mean. Those of you who don’t, reread the OP.
That is all.
DanielWithrow, I do not understand what is meant by “passive voice”, or why it would be wrong. Can you explain?
Hey zenster, ya gonna say anything to me about my post?
Maybe admit you made a honest mistake?
I like it when people have bad spelling or grammar. See, spelling and grammar are two of the very few things at which I’m very good. If everyone met my standards, I wouldn’t be special anymore.
bolding mine
BWA HA HA HA! You’re killing me here!
BWA ha [sub]ha ha ha[/sub]
Man, how’d he get to be such a windbag? It would take three of us working together to be so pompous.
This is dangerously arrogant.
This too.
I do know what your OP means though. At 5000+ posts and 2 years you should know that dopers will nit-pick an OP/rant about bad grammer (‘grammar’, ‘grammer’?)/spelling. Often using sarcasm.
Aw, he’s no fun.
I wanted him to actually debate with any one of us, that would’ve been hilarious. Instead he played the “You guys are losers! I’m not listening to you guys no more! WHAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”
Oh, and zenster? I would think that if you where so anally retentive about spelling, then you’d be a “a loser with too much time correcting my mistakes” considering you took the time out to whine and bitch about someone else’s spelling.
I wonder why, after three years here, Zenster has not managed to grow a thicker skin about such maaters.
I cant* manage a definition but
“I dropped the book” is active voice and
“The book was dropped” is passive voice.
Passive is apparently weaker too read, so normally active is preferred. However passive is used to put emphasis on the object, in scientific writeups, etc…
Grammar checkers annoy milions of people by aklways suggesting active voice. But while voices are different grammatical constructions (and so it makes sense to check for them in a grammar checker) using the wrong voice isn’t a grammatical mistake (IMHO) if the sentance is well formed with the intended meaning both ways.
Daniel Why don’t you suggest how Zen could have rephrased his passive voices to make his post better?
*Several deliberate mistakes included in this post.
Tip for anyone still in school: Passive voice is excellent for term papers and other written assignments with length requirements, as “The book was dropped by the man” takes up waaaaay more space than “The man dropped the book.” You can get away with this in most non-English courses. Indeed, many low-level English classes don’t seem to mind much.
You’re welcome.
I never use spelling checkers because I’m simply too wonderful! Actually, it’s because spelling checkers highlight so many non-errors – proper nouns and/or words that they don’t know – that it takes forever and I get impatient.
And I’m wonderful.
I don’t use spellcheck, ever. It would make me lazy. Besides, a recent study found that people who use spellcheck actually have more errors in their documents, than the ones who actually proofread their work themselves. Going to search the net so I can cite it.
An article about it.
This confirms what I had observed on my own. I used the spellcheck program when writing papers in school, and would later find mistakes that were missed when reading over my work. I quit using it, and feel that my writing has less mistakes now. Sometimes I refer to a dictionary if I have a “brain fart” and cannot remember how to spell a word, but I do not use spellcheck. I loathe it.
Wow! Who knew that grammar geekdom would come in handy with the ladies?
Zenster, I don’t care how many A’s your high school English teacher gave you. I tore your post apart for a reason: I wanted to show you that you’re no perfect poster yourself in these matters. If you can’t be bothered to use commas correctly, why do you think other people will listen to your demands that they spellcheck every post?
This is a message board, and the standards of writing here are more relaxed than the standards of a business letter, or a party invitation, or a grant proposal, or a ninth-grade book report. If someone’s post is so garbled that it’s impossible to understand, you might legitimately ask them to rephrase their point in clearer language. But if someone misspells the odd word, it is rude and arrogant to yell at them about it.
Add your own composition peccadillos to the mix, and it’s rude, arrogant, and hypocritical.
It is, incidentally, pretty funny that a schmoe who takes the time to write a self-righteous rant about misspelled words on a message board would accuse me of having too much spare time.
Aslan2, the passive voice indicates that the subject of the sentence is the object of the action in the verb. For example, in the sentence, “I was struck by the poor comma use in Zenster’s OP,” the subject of the sentence is I. The verb is was struck. Poor comma use was doing the striking.
The passive voice is technically correct, but its overuse can lend a flaccid, bureaucratic, timid tone to a piece of writing. Zenster used the passive voice three times (IIRC) in a short passage; since I was tearing his post apart to make a point, I figured I could legitimately pick on his use of the passive voice.
Daniel
DanielWithrow
I’m still not sure I understand. Can you give us some examples of active voice sentences, and passive voice sentences?
Y’all aren’t just baiting me, are you?
Active Voice
I hit the bastard right in the kisser.
The cow jumped over the moon.
I made mistakes.
Passive Voice
The bastard was hit right in the kisser.
The moon was jumped over by the cow.
Mistakes were made.
Daniel