Lawrence Weinstein, cofounder of Harvard’s Writing Center and director of the writing center at Bentley University, wrote Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us. This is a writing book that explores not just the best ways to write, but how those methods are connected to…
When I start editing your manuscript, I learn something about you, the writer. That’s not just a side effect. It’s actually central to my ability to edit your work effectively. I don’t set out to psychoanalyze you. It’s just impossible not to. To improve a manuscript, I must understand the author’s goals What is the…
Yes, I did that title on purpose. Passive voice is so easy to slip into. I wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe regarding why it now makes sense for the federal government of the US — regulators and lawmakers — to bring the full weight of enforcement on Facebook. The original title was “The…
The Boston Globe posted an article by Larry Edelman about an intrafamily lawsuit. I had trouble parsing the headline. Here it is: Widow of mall developer Disque Deane is sued by their children for fraud What’s the problem here? Look at it this way. When you read a sentence, you load unknowns onto a mental…
Last December, police in Windsor, Virginia, stopped the Black Army medic Caron Nazario in uniform as he was driving his brand new car, and then pepper-sprayed him. Now the town has released a statement about what happened. The statement is notable in that it talks about many things that happened, but hardly any of the…
Dave Maimaron, the head coach of the Duxbury, Massachusetts high school football team, condoned policies that made sport of the Holocaust. Then the town cut ties with him. Duxbury’s letter about the firing is evasive and defensive. What happened in Duxbury Imagine that you a high school football fan at a game between Duxbury and…
Most uses of passive voice are lazy, thoughtless, or evasive. But the “allowed to believe” statement from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s speech is in another category: in just nine words, Greene declares her own idiocy and ignorance, and then blames unspecified forces for highjacking her brain and her fingers. If there is a passive voice…
The lawmakers from the House of Representatives sent a brief to the Senate about the single count of impeachment they’re about to try. For the most part, it’s clear and straightforward. But an analysis of the 115 instances of passive voice in it reveals a lot about what lawmakers — and former president Trump —…
The purpose of police Twitter accounts is to inform people about public safety. The purpose of passive voice is (often) to avoid responsibility. These don’t go together well. Today we examine how the Los Angeles Police used passives that twist the truth into bizarre shapes in describing police shootings. A correspondent brought to my attention…