Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Z is for Zombies

Paula’s not talking about the living dead, but about using the passive tense!

I invariably grit my teeth when I see any writing advice about not using the word ‘was’. It appears regularly in lists of ‘words to delete from your writing’.

In some cases, I would agree, particularly when ‘was’ is used with an adjective. ‘He was happy’ or ‘She was upset’ are examples of telling, and it is far better to delete ‘was’ (plus the adjective) and show the emotions in a far more effective way.

However, some style ‘pundits’ try to tell us that the use of the word ‘was’ with a verb indicates passive tense, and this is where I disagree. For example, ‘She was sitting by the window when he entered the cafe’ is not passive. In this example, ‘was’ is part of the past continuous tense, indicating an ongoing action or state i.e. she was already sitting there when he entered the cafe. If we change the sentence to omit the word ‘was’, the meaning changes. ‘She sat by the window when he entered the cafe’ would give the impression that she sat by the window at the same time as he entered the café.

So where do the zombies come into all this? Recently I read that if you can insert by zombies after a verb, and your sentence still makes sense (in a way!), you are using the passive mode.

So, for example, “He was told (by zombies) to go immediately to the police station’ or ‘His car was hit (by zombies) at the road junction’ are both passive sentences, which could easily be converted into active mode e.g. His wife told him to go immediately to the police station’ or ‘A large van hit his car at the road junction.’

Grammatically speaking, the passive mode consists of the word ‘was’ followed by the past participle of a verb. However, although the general advice is to avoid passive verbs, there are times when they cannot be avoided. Sometimes this is when the person(s) performing the action is/are unknown e.g. ‘The building was demolished in the 1970s.’ Yes, you can insert by zombies in this sentence, and, assuming you actually know who demolished it, you could change it to active tense, e.g. ‘The local council (or the owners, or whoever) decided to demolish the building in the 1970s’ – but in this case, you could be introducing extra information that is irrelevant to your story, so this is an occasion when I think the passive tense is acceptable.

Therefore, by all means use the by zombies trick to indicate passive tense in your work, but, as with all these so-called ‘rules’, use your own discretion!

9 comments:

  1. Interesting trick to test for passive voice.
    I agree that "was xxx" can convey as sense of live action in a scene. Sometimes reducing things to just past tense kills the immediacy, IMO.
    Great post!

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    1. Reducing a verb to a simple past tense can work sometimes but there are times when you definitely need the continuous past.

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  2. I was very good at English at school but I no longer think about grammar. I simply write what I think sounds right - and invariably it is. A good blog, though, Paula.

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    1. I'm like you, Margaret, and tend to go with what I feel sounds right!

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  3. As with most rules, it depends on what you're trying to convey and how deeply you want to involve the reader. But saying the word "was" means it's passive is just someone who doesn't understand exactly what passive tense is, so your zombie trick is a great one!

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    1. Unless they're saying "passive" without referring to the passive tense. They could be saying it makes the sentence less immediate and the action more distancing. In that case, I agree. However, I don't think you need to get rid of all of them.

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    2. I agree it's wrong to say that the word 'was' always indicates the passive tense - which is why these lists of 'word not to use' in your writing can be very misleading!

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  4. I love the 'by zombies' trick! So fun.

    I have to say, for every 'rule' out there, there's usually a darn good reason for breaking it when you're writing. I think a lot of that rule breaking contributes to a writer's style.

    I'm not saying go hog wild and use incorrect grammar and spelling all the time, I'm just saying I firmly believe there's a time and a place to break the rules.

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  5. A really interesting post. It made me think about my own writing. I will have to go and look for places where I can inset the zombies trick!

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