Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 13: Passive

Use of the passive voice is one way we have in English of emphasizing and refocusing information. English has fairly fixed word order, with the subject first, then the verb, and then other stuff (direct object, prepositional phrase, adjective, adverb, etc.). But perhaps you want to foreground the direct object rather than the subject. You can’t just put it up front to emphasize it (as in Latin or Russian or other languages with case marking endings that indicate the functions of the nouns); rather, in English you can passivize the sentence by moving the direct object into the subject position, which then triggers several other grammatical operations:
• the subject appears at the end of the sentence in a by-prepositional phrase
• a form of auxiliary be comes in
• the main verb changes into the past participle
• and then you can optionally delete the by-phrase
Here are some examples. Note that the tense is always maintained; passive doesn't affect the tense:

The eagle ate the rat.
The rat was eaten by eagle.

The police are arresting the suspects.
The suspects are being arrested by the police.

So those are the logistics. For the most part, we all do it – make active and passive sentences – easily and effortlessly. But sometimes we are advised to avoid the use of passive in writing (though that was it right there). It is viewed (passive again) as obscuring the agent (which it can do, but maybe that’s what you want to do), as being too wordy, or as being too vague (which again, could be the point – that’s why we use it in speech, when we don’t want or don’t need to be specific about who is doing something, about who or what the agent is). In student writing, I often see attempts to avoid passive (or what someone thinks is passive) turn into much more garbled, awkward sentences. If students can easily identify passive, however, then they can make good rhetorical choices about whether they want to use passive or not.

The suggestion to avoid passive is often lumped in with another suggestion to avoid all forms of be. And since forms of be are necessarily a part of the passive verb string, that includes passive. But this avoidance of any form of be can also lead to some bad substitutions when students simply comb through their writing for all forms of be and substitute a not-quite-synonym like exist. Getting students to think about the verbs in their writing is useful. And not using be quite so much is probably a good idea. (It is the most common verb in English, according to the Oxford English Corpus. The is the most common word overall, followed by be.) Some writing instructors note that be (and its forms) does not add enough “umph,” or it simply equates (this is that), or that it’s too general. Considering other verbs and considering some reorganization that leads to the use of other verbs can perhaps improve the writing. But just scanning for be or for passive and then substituting generally makes things worse. It’s really not that time-consuming or difficult to discuss passive and the forms of be and doing so will have other pay-offs since students will then have a clearer understanding of this complex syntactic operation, of the unconscious knowledge they already possess about how it works grammatically and rhetorically, and then, if its use or overuse really is an issue in student writing, students will have the tools to revise.

Another problem with simply telling students to avoid the use of passive is that they’ll see plenty of passive out there in “good writing,” and also their intuitions will tell them that it’s not only not a bad aspect of the language, but can be a very useful one. Here’s a nice list of some of the myths about passive in writing. I will not send you to LanguageLog’s many discussions of the passive (which is mostly about pointing out misidentification of passive - a bit too gotcha - but if you must take a peek, here’s the link).

So recognizing passive is straightforward: a form of be plus the past participial form of a verb. Always. (Ok, I should know better than to say always, but almost always - except when be is get: She got hit by the ball.) And you can check it by creating the corresponding active sentence. Every passive has an active counterpart (though not the other way around since there are plenty of sentences that do not have a passive counterpart. Only sentences that have direct objects can even be passivized.) (You can review past participles in the lesson on the five forms of verbs.)

Passive exercises by Beth Keyser are here, included in a lesson on auxiliary verbs. Much fun will be had by you and your students. :)

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 12: Adjectives

Just as the meaning-based definitions for nouns and verbs can be problematic, so too can a definition of adjective that labels it simply as a “describing word”; nouns can also describe (linguistics book), as can verbs (She is diving.), so, again, it is the morphological and syntactic information that is more reliable and less subjective when identifying adjectives.

Most adjectives take comparative and superlative morphology: -er/-est or the words more and most. (For more on what it is that determines which a word can take, see this document.)

So now we already have a handy test for adjectives.

Test 1 for Adjectives: Does the word have a comparative and superlative form?

small, smaller, smallest
curious, more curious, most curious
ugly, uglier, ugliest
difficult, more difficult, most difficult

There's a lesson on TeachLing on the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. (I should note that many adverbs also have comparative and superlative forms: I run faster than you. I'll come back to adverbs in some later post.)

Now, some adjectives cannot be compared since they are not gradable, so it might be weird to say

This chair is more wooden than that one.
He is more married than she is.

since you’re either wooden or you’re not, married or not, and so on. Sometimes, however, we use these forms in certain situations and they do make sense. If someone said that one chair is more wooden than another, what might that mean?

Gradability is also relevant for a second test for adjectives, their ability to be used with a degree word, like very.

Test 2 for Adjectives: Can the word by preceded by a degree word?

Degree words (also sometimes called intensifiers) are a part of speech (sometimes misclassified as adverbs, though they have different syntactic and morphological behavior – I’ll come back to that at some point) that, well, express degree, so words like very, so, too, more, less, quite, almost, kind of, rather, pretty, sort of, or extremely.

Again, as with the comparative and superlative forms for adjectives, there are some adjectives that resist a word like very since they are already opposite ends on a scale – complete/incomplete, married/not married, wooden/non wooden, pregnant/not pregnant. Does very work with these adjectives? We do use it that way, so you might want to have your students explain what something like "very complete" might mean and when it might be used (rather than just saying "don't say that" or "we can't say that").

Test 3 for Adjectives: Can the word follow a linking verb?

Adjectives occur in two basic positions: before a noun (the furry cat) and following a linking verb (the cat is furry). Linking verbs do just that – “link” to the subject noun phrase by renaming it. Linking verbs include sense verbs like taste, smell, feel, as well as verbs of “existence” like be, remain, seem, appear, grow, or become.

Jojo is tall.
The cat remains skittish.
The toast tastes burned.

So there you go. Three easy tests to use to verify whether a word is an adjective. Anywhere where there is uncertainty or disagreement among your students provides the perfect opportunity to do analysis, some figuring out. If you’re uncertain, that simply means something interesting is going on. One place where there may be some debate is figuring out whether participles are adjectives or verbs. So here’s a document and exercise on that. Another place for disagreement may be with color terms. And a third is with noun modifiers of nouns, so here’s a link to a document on that.

Strand 3/Conventions – Post 4: Clauses and Punctuation

The writing errors considered the most serious have to do with marking (or not) clause boundaries. See examples on various Top 10 error lists here and here and here and here and lots of other places.

So once students can identify clauses, they can easily avoid these errors. The lessons previously posted on this blog here, here and here and the TeachLing lessons cited within those are all good ways to identify subjects in order to identify clauses, and therefore avoid writing in run-ons/comma splices or fragments, if that’s your goal.

There’s a lesson here on punctuating complex clauses and a short one here on choosing different punctuation to create different meanings and effects. Write on.

Strand 3/Conventions – Post 3: Punctuation clarifies – or doesn’t

The primary purpose of punctuation is to clarify, to help the reader understand the text. There are some common examples of how punctuation can disambiguate phrases and sentences that would otherwise be ambiguous.

Let’s eat Zelda.

With no comma this example, of course, means that we will eat Zelda. Simply add a comma and we are now addressing Zelda.

Let’s eat, Zelda.

The comma in the example above helps the reader to read the text in the way that is intended. Although the previous post discusses the fact that punctuation does not typically correlate with speech pauses, it often does correlate with intonation – the pitch across the string of words. And in examples like those above, the intonation distinctions in the spoken versions of these sentences would allow the listener to understand the words just as they were intended.

You can find plenty of other examples of changes in punctuation leading to changes of meaning – often unintended. I don’t even want to link to them since many of them are rants, suggesting the downfall of a society that doesn’t pay enough attention to punctuation, but if you’re so inclined, you may search. A few of the most prevalent examples are the one above (usually with Grandma instead of Zelda, the “dear John” example (ok, I’ll link to that one), and the panda joke, now also the title of a book by Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves.

A panda walks into a bar, sits down and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich, pulls out a gun and shoots the waiter dead. As the panda stands up to go, the bartender shouts, “Hey! Where are you
going? You just shot my waiter and you didn't pay for your sandwich!” The panda yells back at the bartender, “Hey, I'm a PANDA! Look it up!” The bartender opens his dictionary and sees the following definition for panda: "A tree dwelling marsupial of Asian origin, characterized by distinct black and white coloring. Eats shoots and leaves.

So the punctuation in these examples certainly is useful, marking various kinds of phrases and clauses, resulting in different interpretations. (Though the panda one is really an artificial example since writers don't typically leave out that first comma between eats and shoots. Now, the so-called Oxford comma is a different story, which perhaps I'll return to.)

But sometimes punctuation is purely convention. It doesn’t mark grammatical distinctions or intonation contours or anything. But it’s conventional, so we do it. We learn to put a comma between a city name and a state name (Ferndale, Washington) and between the day of the month and the year (April 15, 2000), but wouldn’t these be just as easy for the reader to understand with no commas?

And capitalization – is that punctuation? We capitalize certain words by convention: proper nouns, of course, but also the pronoun I. Does capitalization of I serve to clarify? We’re accustomed to it as a convention, so it would be odd to us not to do it, but we don’t capitalize any other pronouns like She, They, or even the other first person singular Me. That would be strange, wouldn’t it?

And what about the apostrophe used in contractions? By convention, we put an apostrophe when letters have been deleted, so do plus not becomes don’t, but wouldn’t dont be just as clear in context?

Why dont you try it? Cant you read it just fine? Wouldnt it be easy enough?

Another example of punctuation as simply convention is the rule regarding end punctuation and quotation marks. The convention within the US is for all punctuation to go inside quotation marks, so it looks like the following example, with the period after okra preceding the ”:

The girl said, “I like okra.”

However, the convention in the UK is for the punctuation to go outside the quotation marks:

The girl said, “I like okra”.

One rule does not necessarily make more sense than the other and neither has anything to do with grammatical categories or with even clarity – it’s simply convention.

Such rules of punctuation are often lumped in to the study of “grammar,” broadly defined. However, these rules of writing do not depend on and are not affected by our spoken language or our unconscious (or conscious) knowledge of it. These “conventional” rules must be taught and learned, and are not the natural rules of language itself.

Ok, but on to the rules of punctuation that do correlate with grammatical distinctions.

Strand 3/Conventions - Post 2: Mini History of Punctuation

Early punctuation was more related to speaking than to reading. Latin texts were originally written without spaces between words. Punctuation marks began as a guide to reading texts aloud, and word spaces were finally introduced around the eighth century BCE. Early Old English texts needed marks to indicate when the speaker should pause to give emphasis or indications of where to breathe.

Because Old English texts were handwritten and because there were not yet any standards for punctuation at the time (800-1100), it is not surprising that there was great variability in the punctuation used. Although some scribes used no punctuation at all, most used the point (a period) to mark a rhetorical break of some kind or a suggestion for where to breathe when reading aloud. Points were written on the line or above the line. Semicolons indicated longer breaks, and punctus elevatus, looking something like our modern comma, marked a shorter break. Question marks (punctus interrogativus) were sometimes used, but not required, in questions.

Spaces occurred between words in compounds, between prefixes and suffixes and the roots or words to which they were attached, and sometimes between syllables. Prepositions, pronouns, and adverbs were typically attached to following words, and word breaks at the end of a line were often at syllable breaks, sometimes marked with a hyphen, sometimes not. Proper names were not capitalized, and although some scribes capitalized the first letter of the word beginning a sentence, not all did. Nouns were often written with the determiners and prepositions they formed constituents with.

It’s pretty cool to look at some old texts to see these techniques. Here’s one, The Leechbook of Bald, which was an Old English medical text probably compiled in the ninth-century, possibly under the influence of Alfred the Great's educational reforms. And here's a link to other Old English manuscripts.

It was not until the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century that we see the beginnings of the practices of modern day punctuation, which then became fairly codified by the 18th century. The British playwright Ben Jonson is often given credit for putting down many of the rules as we know them. In his 1640 book The English Grammar he discusses the primary functions of the various punctuation marks, marking the point at which punctuation correlates more with grammatical function of the words than with breathing patterns of speakers. In an 1892 book by John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, we see an acknowledgement of this shift.

It is sometimes stated in works on Rhetoric and Grammar, that the points are for the purpose of elocution, and directions are given to pupils to pause a certain time at each of the stops. It is true that a pause required for elocutionary purposes does sometimes coincide with a grammatical point, and so the one aids the other. Yet it should not be forgotten that the first and main ends of the points is to mark grammatical divisions. Good elocution often requires a pause where there is no break whatever in the grammatical continuity, and where the insertion of a point would make nonsense. (John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, 1892)

What Hart said in 1892 still holds true, and teaching comma and period usage as correlating with pauses in speech can lead writers to make errors of comma usage. A study by Danielewicz and Chafe (“How `Normal’ Speaking Leads to `Erroneous’ Punctuation,” in S. Freedman, ed., The Acquisition of Written Language. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 213-225. 1985) reports on punctuation practices of college freshmen. They suggest that what might appear to be punctuation errors in freshman compositions are attempts to capture prosodic features of speech in writing. The writers seem to be punctuating to mark the intonation they would have used in speaking. Consider this example from the writing of one of the students in the study:

One of these categories, that I can be classified in is that of an only child.

Danielewicz and Chafe propose that the comma in this student's example indicates an intonation boundary. Such “errors” are likely reinforced from one of the only things that most students are taught about commas – that they mark pauses. In fact, most commas – one estimate says 70% – do not correlate with pauses in spoken language. We know that punctuation used to mark breathing pauses, but does not do so consistently anymore.

Ok, so commas and periods no longer correlate with spoken language pauses. What do they mark then?

Strand 3/Conventions - Post 1: Oh, Punctuation!

Punctuation is not linguistics (except when it is – see Geoff Nunberg’s The Linguistics of Punctuation). However, one of the primary concerns of many of the pre- and in-service teachers I work with is dealing with convention errors in their students’ writing – comma splices, fragments, and other usage errors (some are perceived errors, not actual ones, so I'll discuss that too). And there have been some requests from you to post some lessons related directly to punctuation, so here goes.

While I am obviously a strong advocate for taking time to delve into the study of grammar beyond its relation to punctuation, it is at least beneficial to better understand how the two relate to each other, and I've already alluded to this in some other posts (for example, this one on identifying clauses mentions fragments in writing). A brief investigation of the history of the punctuation, a better understanding of the various roles it has in our written language, and the ways in which standards of punctuation vary can all help students negotiate its use and will result, I’m certain, in fewer errors in writing.

Certainly knowledge of grammatical categories (like phrases and clause types) and certain grammatical functions (like modification) correlates with certain conventions; for example, to accurately punctuate complex clauses, one must know the distinction between subordinate clauses and coordinated clauses, or to accurately punctuate various kinds of modifying phrases, one must know whether something is a modifier or not. Now it is likely the case that the primary way we learn punctuation is by reading “accurately-punctuated” texts – but then there’s lots of variation there too (fragments are all over casual text and much fiction writing). Consider the fragments in this passage from Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch:

Inside, a tall, pale man dressed in black stood halfway down the hall, staring into a doorway. Beyond him, a dark room. A worn bed. White sheets dull in the shadow. Didn’t look like anyone had slept there in months. Dusty floor. Even before he’d started seeing Sintra, his place hadn’t looked this bad. (3)

So students will pick up on the fact that fragments are out there in "good" writing. It's all about making good rhetorical choices.

Strand 2/Morphology – Part 7: More on Verb Affixes

The Strand 1/Grammar post on Verb Morphology fits in nicely here. It focuses on ways to identify verbs, using affixes unique to verbs, such as the past tense -ed (an inflectional affix), but also derivational affixes (that “derive” new words) like dis-, re-, -ate, -ize, and -en. (And not focusing on a meaning-based definition of verb as an action word or a state of being.) There are lots of different kinds of problem-solving activities that could grow out of this verbal affixation topic. It’s important, however, to make sure that the students discover the patterns and categories, rather than simply telling them that some affix attaches to some verb and changes the meaning in a particular way. (See my rant on that here.)

Here’s one lesson plan that focuses on re-, illustrating the patterns – the kinds of verbs re- attaches to, the restrictions on the attachment, and re- with roots that are not stand-alone verbs.

And there are lots of lists of prefixes and suffixes (and Latin and Greek roots) and accompanying lessons already out there, some mentioned here.

An example of the kind of exploration comes from a prefix like un-. It has a straightforward meaning that students can discover when they examine a set of data:

undo
untie
unfasten
untangle

The prefix means something like “reverse action” of whatever the verb is. There’s another un- that attaches to adjectives:

unhappy
uninhibited
unequal

And this affix doesn’t mean “reverse” but rather “not.” So there are two affixes that look the same, but have different meanings and attach to different parts of speech.

(These two distinct affixes which attach to two different parts of speech and have different meanings results in a cool ambiguity with words like the adjective unlockable. Notice that this word can have opposite meanings, that the door can be unlocked (able to be unlocked) or that the door cannot be locked (not lockable). You can have students think about how this can be. It’s not a typical situation since there are not many homophonic affixes like un-; there’s the un- that attaches to adjectives and means ‘not’ and the un- that attaches to verbs and means ‘reverse.’ It’s a good activity to get students to think about these pieces of words and how much meaning is packed in there that we usually take for granted.)

Another take-away from these activities is the awareness that we build up words in a step-wise fashion, attaching certain affixes before others. Again, we do this automatically as native speakers, but understanding the complexity of this automatic process is empowering for native speakers and instructive for non-native speakers of English. There’s a lesson on that here.

Don't forget to check out Ann Whiting's 7th graders' word exploration blog for other great ideas and similar word study. And if you're feeling intimidated about your analysis of these complex words, Whiting's students take advantage of a great resource, the Online Etymological Dictionary, where you can look up affixes as well as whole words. This dictionary offers a way to continue the exploration using something other than a standard dictionary, especially when seeking a single answer to "what part of speech is this?" That is, you want to encourage students to figure out the parts of speech on their own, but if this is too challenging, or if you want to focus on research tools and etymology, send them to this dictionary to help them explore the meanings of the parts.