On Feb 14, 2006, at 20:31, Martha Krieg wrote:
Avoiding the passive may be an American fad... but I remember being
taken to task for using it back in the mid-70s when writing my
dissertation.
Nope, it's *not* an American fad... :)
During my U years (5, starting with October 1967), passive was as bad
as pox, and we (the English Dept at the Warsaw U) sneered at American
English with as much zest as Americans exercise in crafting Polack
jokes <g> And we tried to imitate the *British* standards to the best
of our ability (which, once the Vistula river washes through your
palate, is not a heck of a lot <g>).
One of the reasons I never questioned the "passive taboo" is that the
textbook I (and thousands others) used to learn English from was
*British* (the mother tongue before the English language lost its
morals <g>), published in 1947 (2 yrs before I was born). And that book
-- if you got to the more exalted levels (vols 4 and 5) -- *definitely
said* that passive form was acceptable only in scholarly papers. Not in
everyday speech and not in hoi-polloi writing...
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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