Often Wrong, Never in Doubt
The mistake people make about this is that they're measuring effects of language without thinking about the readers.
Material relevant to this article starts at 24:10.
It is often difficult for me to know whether, when writing about education, I am running afoul of the generally good advice to not say anything unless you have something good to say or whether instead I am just trespassing against the weird twenty-first century online social dynamic which tends to treat complaining about education as evidence of some kind of underlying psychological malady.
Most of the time, I don't even try to figure out which one it is, which is why it's Christmas and I am complaining again. Here goes:
It is genuinely frustrating to observe how education so confidently comes down on the wrong side of issues large and small, time and time again. I have actually started to catalog them for a possible book project: a reliance on folk theorizing; presentism; terrible instincts about the functions and value of human memory, knowledge, procedures, testing, and explanations; an inexplicable ignorance about the ubiquity of rules and routines in social life; a corrosive obsession with personalization; backwards notions about motivation and creativity—to name but a few.
The clip above demonstrates another of these issues—definitely on the "small" side as issues go—that I have railed against for the better part of two decades, with limited success.
Two sentences: “The dog chased the cat” and “The cat was chased by the dog.” As I said yesterday, I've used this sentence for literally thousands of people in hundreds of sessions. And in the U.S., and in some places around the world, I've asked the question, which of these sentences is clearer and more concise?
And I can guarantee you that in the United States, 90% of people will immediately say the first sentence is clearer and more concise. And I'll give you two reasons for it. It's shorter, and it has an active verb. This is nonsense . . . it's complete, patent, obvious nonsense. It is simply not true that sentences are more concise when they're shorter and they have active verbs. The mistake people make about this is that they're measuring effects of language without thinking about the readers.
So, when readers of English—and I don't know whether it's always true, but we think it's true of native speakers of English—when readers of English read a text to think about the world, to think about the content of the text, they read in very predictable patterns. And one of the patterns is that they read subjects in very particular ways. They do something special with subjects. Now, the way to put it is, subjects have a function for readers' cognitive processing that's very distinctive.
And it has a lot to do with the reader's impression of what's clear and what's concise. So, you all are storytellers. You can tell me. Which readers will find this [first] sentence less clear and less concise and would find this [second] sentence more clear and more concise? Which readers? Anybody who wants to know about the cat. The effect of subjects on readers is to create the focus of the sentence.
When they process a sentence, the subject is what the sentence is about. So, this [first sentence] is a sentence about a dog. This [second sentence] is a sentence about a cat. What if the audience cares about the cat? I don't know whether you care about cats or not—you may be a cat hater, cat lover—I want you to pretend that you love cats. Alright? It's a stretch for some people, I know. I did this talk once and had somebody come up afterwards and said, "I refuse to pretend that I love cats." Do it for me anyway. Pretend you love cats. And here's a speaker who says, "The dog! I'm gonna tell you a story about a dog! There's also a cat involved, but it's a dog. It's a story about a dog!" It takes you about three sentences to zone out.
Here's what happens: if you care about the cat, and I tell you that the dog chased the cat, what happens is you have to process the sentence twice. First you process it as a sentence about a dog. Then your brain says, "I don't care about the dog." So you have to translate the sentence into a sentence about a cat. Well, if you're reading, there's some chance you'll actually do that. But if you're listening to a speech, there's zero chance that you will actually do that because you don't have time. The speaker is already going on to the next sentence, and you're thinking, "Well, maybe the next sentence will be about a cat. Nope. That one's about a dog, too. Maybe the next sentence will be about a cat. Nope. There's still the dog." And you're gone. This is an enormously powerful tool for speech writers because speakers don't get this.
A speaker stands up and says, "Okay, . . . I'm going to give a speech about this new section of the law that's just been amended." Why is anybody going to listen to it? Well, because it affects companies, and they want to get up and say, the law does this, the law does that, the law does this, and at the end of every sentence there's a reference to companies. And in three sentences, if you're talking to people who own companies, you've lost the audience. So I say to them, all you have to do is to say, companies will be allowed to, companies will be permitted to, companies will be. And you know what they say to me? Those are passive verbs. I'm not kidding. I have people say, no, no, you can't do that, you cannot do that, those are passive verbs.
This passive verb myth does enormous amounts of damage . . . No reason to believe me. Go and look at any piece of good writing in English, you will find passive verbs . . .
People have said to me, "What about George Orwell? He says, in Politics and the English Language, he says don't use passive verbs." More than once people have come up to me and said, "Well, excuse me, Larry, but, you know, this seems to be a battle of authorities here. And there's George Orwell [on one side], and there's you [on the other]." And so I've learned to say to them, "So you've read Politics and the English Language." And they say, "Yes, I have." And so I say to them, "Does Orwell use passive verbs?" They look at me like, what do you mean? "I mean, in the essay, does Orwell use passive verbs?" And they say, "Well, no, he says you shouldn't." "I didn't ask you what he said. I said, does he use passive verbs?" 20% of the verbs in that essay are passive. 20%. We're not talking about one here and there. There are a couple of paragraphs where every verb is passive. Now, I get that there are reasons not to use passive verbs, but there's just as many reasons to use them.
So I'm just pointing out to you that controlling the subject position is far more important than any kind of problem you have with the subject verbs.
