As i am writing this essay (which is going along quite well now that I actually STARTED it ) I was thinking about what a professor told us yesterday in a different class. He said to avoid using the verb ‘be’ in essays, saying it ‘smudges up’ the meaning of verbs and dilutes them
Well, here I am seeing that I’ve written the verb ‘be’ a whole bunch of times already, and trying to think of how I can say something without using the word ‘is’, and suddenly I thought of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The Knights of Nee cannot bear to hear or say the word…crap I can’t remember if they don’t like the word ‘is’ or ‘it’, but even if I’m totally wrong about the whole ‘is’ thing, the point is I suddenly have this revelation that the Knights of Nee are these really anal retentive English professors who put their students over a barrel trying to get them to modify their language in writing.
But maybe this is just a caffeine-induced hallucination… :eek:
You’re discussing E Prime, the subset of the English language that lacks the verb “to be”. Using E-Prime will help you to create more factually accurate sentences.
However, I present a portion of the script from Holy Grail:
This post is… was… dammit. Was almost composed in E-Prime.
I don’t know if it’s a matter of factual accuracy, but using verbs that convery action can seriously improve the clarity of your writing. That’s one of the things that was stressed in my writing class in college.
Incubus, your professor is trying to make the students get away from passive voice and use active voice. Of course, if he didn’t actually explain passive and active voice to you, and how to fix it, the requirement can seem ridiculous if not completely moronic.
If he’s left the students with the impression that every sentence containing any form of “to be” is in passive voice, I vote for “moron.”
I usually have to spend at least one class period every semester explaining that 1) not all sentences containing some form of “to be” are in passive voice; 2) not all sentences containing auxiliary verbs are in passive voice; 3) not all sentences in the past tense are in passive voice. (I don’t know where people pick up this last notion, but they do.) And there are always students who still don’t get it.
Boy, y’all are quick to jump on this. What’s going on?
Anyway, I didn’t explain it very well. The recommendation wasn’t so much to blindly avoid the passive voice and forms of the verb “to be”, but rather to make sure that your verbs actually denote actions, and aren’t just fulfilling their grammatical obligations. It’s the difference between “A conversation was held between myself and Amy” and “I talked to Amy”. The former’s a great way to use a lot of words and say nothing, and in complex sentences it can leave your readers bewildered. The latter is clear and straightforward. Does anyone take issue with that sort of recommendation?
There are English teachers who consider that subverting the action of a sentence into the subordinate clause makes for weak writing – as in this sentence, which might better be stated “Some English teachers condemn placing the action of a sentence in a subordinate clause.” (See how much less wordy and how much stronger the second form is?)
Generally, rants against the use of forms of “to be” constitute efforts to get stronger, more vibrant writing out of students who are comfortable with their first constructions, even if they relegate the important information to a small fraction of the sentence structure.
However, my impression was that the Pythonic knights said “Ni” – Knights who say “Née” are usually in charge of society reporting, identifying the maiden names of women who have married, died, or otherwise become marginally newsworthy. (My favorite horrible pun from society-reportage English concerns a woman’s abrupt second marriage: “She rewed the day her divorce became final.”)
My English teachers in intermediate school had the same fixation as Incubus’s of deleting be verbs, and they never explained passive and active voice. They just seemed to hate be verbs. I never understood it until recently (I’m now 22), and I always had a hell of a time deleting be verbs, especially as I didn’t know why I was doing it.
As has been said, blindly purging your essay of the “to be” verbs will lead to disaster.
Consider: In ninth grade, I wrote an essay on Moby Dick. There was one additional requirement: the teacher did not permit any form of the verb “to be” at any point in the essay.
As a result: “…author says revenge is wrong because…” became “…author says revenge has wrong to its name because…”
Of course, the way I’d put it now, 17 years later, if I had to write another paper on Moby Dick: “A quest for revenge is a search for hell.”
The dictum against passive voice is a decree against automatic habits. The “to be” form is only a good search term to use if you want to find the passive voice automatically and badly used. That said, “to be” is a tool. So, for that matter, is the passive voice - it is occasionally useful, if you need to stress the direct object above the subject (“My son was hit by a car” vs “A car hit my son”). Fact is, I’d forget about the good ole etre and look for sentences that contain the word by… and then use my head and consider whether the passive voice really communicates what I’m trying to say, or should I use another form?
Both Fowler and Follett are strong on the erroneous idea that the passive voice is somehow ‘wrong’ – certainly it is less forceful and more soporific than the active, but it has an important place.
A sentence of the sort “Goethe wrote his Faust in 1822” is appropriate in an essay about Goethe – but in an essay about the Faustus legend, the focus should be on the play and not Goethe, and a passive voice construction such as “The classic dramatic renderings of the Faust legend were written by Marlowe in 1590 and Goethe in 1822” is much more appropriate.
Common sense generally triumphs in cases of this sort, if anyone chooses to employ it.
The answer, my friends, is that the Pythons were drawing on their schooling in (and interest in) matters Swedish to offer a seriously esoteric joke. (I read once that a couple of the Pythons took Swedish classes in university. More to the point, the opening credits to “Holy Grail” have the ongoing joke of irrelevant Swedish-language subtitles/commentary.) It boils down to this: “ni” is the Swedish informal second-degree personal pronoun, and, at least in a more old-fashioned era, inappropriate use of it was considered a serious faux pas.
I discovered the grammatical angle from a quaint and curious slim book, titled On Being Swedish, written some forty years ago (and thus contemporaneous with the Pythons’ Swedish-language classes) by an American (or perhaps English, I don’t remember) expat who married a Swede and settled there. Come to think about it, the fellow could even have been a Canadian, but I digress…
In a chapter on matters linguistic, he observed a strict formalism in the application of the language’s two second-degree personal pronouns (for “you, singular”): the formal one, which is to be used in the vast majority of interactions, and an extremely informal one, “ni”, to be reserved for only the most intimate of relationships (lovers, lifelong friends, siblings, etc.). He stressed that inappropriate use of the informal “ni” would likely shock and offend the person you address thusly, so when in doubt, use the formal one.
Now the dialogue about saying “ni!” to little old ladies and threatening to say “ni!” to someone makes sense, …no?
) I was thinking about what a professor told us yesterday in a different class. He said to avoid using the verb ‘be’ in essays, saying it ‘smudges up’ the meaning of verbs and dilutes them 
