Gordaen's Blog

The purpose of language is to communicate (unless you agree with Mr. Keating, then it is to “woo women”). We have specific rules that make the language more effective, such as how to add tense to a verb or pluralize a noun. Then we have rules that someone came up with that are more prescriptive. And an example would be that you should not start a sentence with a conjunction. Nor should you end a sentence with a preposition, because the objects should all be taken care of.

To this, I say: “Bogus!”

Essentially, the reasoning behind these rules is convention and/or a matter of giving someone the opportunity to be condescending. “Oh, you end your sentences with prepositions? Pssh, you do not write English very well, do you?” Tell these people that they’re wrong, and then they’ll reiterate this artificial rule. Just reply: “Look it up.” Words that we typically consider participles are often used as particles. In other words, they’re a piece of the verb. Compare the clause “it is full of hope” to “it is taken care of” and note the difference. All of the words in “taken care of” constitute the verb phrase; removing or moving one of them changes the meaning. It actually can be more complicated than this, but I think this paragraph alone should put doubt into the minds of the hardened believers. People cling onto rules like the preposition one, because they went through the painful experience of learning them, so those people want to feel good about themselves.

Another common one is how active voice is somehow better than passive voice. Active voice is when the clause’s subject is performing the actual action. I wrote this post. Passive voice is when the subject is actually the recipient of the action. This post was written (by me). The “by me” is optional in this case. The passive voice is helpful for politicians, because it’s easy to avoid blame. The economy was really messed up. It’s also useful when you don’t know certain details or those details aren’t important. The Old English epic Beowulf was written about a thousand years ago. Basically, passive voice is useful when the noun performing the action is not as important as the object in the topic being discussed.