How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (19 page)

Better, right? A description of how often she is shown in a cowboy hat (which I admittedly made up) is funnier, more precise, and more vivid than the vague
in.
The transplanted U of Alabama reference illustrates the way you can often strengthen a sentence by rejiggering a prepositional phrase and putting it before the noun.
Thus
The owner of the shop
becomes
The shop’s owner
or
The shop owner; a guy with a bald head
becomes
a bald guy.

As I said, English is not German, where complex and endless adjectives can be constructed, so sometimes you have to figure out exactly how a string of prepositions can be condensed.

8.
to Use
to
Be
or Not to Use
to
Be

a. Abstract Nouns

Preposition abuse is often linked to a couple of other weak sisters of language: the verbs
to be
(often in the form of the passive voice) or
to have,
the definite article (that is,
the
), and abstract nouns, especially ones ending in
-tion.
The problem is especially vexing in my field, academia. But you also find it in government, business, and various other outposts of bureaucracy, where passing the buck and generally not saying what you mean is valued. In this (admittedly extreme) example, abstract nouns are in
bold,
to be
verbs in [brackets],
the
s in
italics
, and prepositions
underlined
.

(I threw in a current cliché,
going forward
, just for fun.)

So much mealymouthed dancing around the subject, so little meat. The point, such as it is, seems to be:

Here’s a simple two-part way of sussing out if a
to be
verb is a problem.

b. The Passive Can Be Used, but Not Always

Don’t use the passive voice
is one of those rules—like
change “the fact that” to “that”
or
don’t use fragments
—that many writing books are a bit too quick to proclaim. The passive can be deployed quite effectively. The previous sentence is an example, I would submit—certainly of the passive voice, but also of not-at-all-bad writing. Not only is it perfectly okay as is, but if you switched to active, you would produce a dull monstrosity along the lines of:
Many writers deploy the passive voice quite effectively.
Who are these faceless writers? (Take a memo: we’re adding
many
to the list of words that should be avoided if possible.)

Putting the matter in general terms, the passive is fine if your emphasis is properly on the object of the verb, rather than the subject, or if a quality of the subject isn’t knowable. The passive
President Kennedy was shot earlier today
is better than the active
An unknown gunman shot President Kennedy earlier today.

The passive is a problem if and only if it leaves in its wake an insistent question that begins with the word
Who?
The classic non-apology-apology
was made famous, if not originated, by Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s press secretary, in 1973, in reference to what he had previously said about the
Washington Post
’s Watergate coverage: “We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments.” That quote went down in history because Ziegler tried to fudge the key point: who made the mistakes?

Scientific writing apparently demands the passive voice. However, in other forms, it should be used sparingly. In the passage below, it appears four times in three sentences.

In my judgment, 1 is fine, 2 is bad, and the last two are borderline. But the passage can only sustain one passive, so I would get rid of 3 because it’s easily changed. So a possible rewrite could be.

9.
WHAT THE MEANING OF “IS IS” IS

Redundant
is almost always hurled as a negative epithet indicating repetitiveness or tautology, but it can be an effective rhetorical device. Shorn of all redundancy, Shakespeare’s “most unkindest cut of all” would be pretty vanilla and the ad slogan “Raid Kills Bugs Dead” would become the ho-hum “Raid Kills Bugs.” Meanwhile, Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” would have to be completely erased because the quotation is nothing
but
redundancy. (
Completely erased
is redundant as well—something is either erased or it isn’t. But I felt like I needed the emphasis provided by
completely.
)

Most of the time, however, redundancy is mindless and bad, an instance of a writer reflexively putting down multiple words all denoting the same thing. It’s tough to prove, but I have little doubt that redundancy is on the upswing, a manifestation of the wordiness and clunkiness that characterizes much writing these days. An example—in spoken English, certainly—is the phrase
is is.
A second
is
is usually (though not always—see the fourth word of this sentence) both redundant and superfluous. I just searched the phrase
is is
on National Public Radio’s Web site and was presented with 1,810 hits. The most recent are:

And, to go to the other side of the political spectrum, here’s a question from Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren that’s not only redundant, it’s not a question:

Maybe that extra word seems like a hedge against misunderstanding, or maybe it just comes along with the prolixity of the age. In any case, it should go.

I have started to note, in my students’ work and in all sorts of published work, the blooming of a lot of other phrases that are equally redundant, though not as obviously so.