Starting with a T

[cos]

Do any of you notice, when typing an email or a blog post or something like that, that you're tending to start so many sentences with a "T", you consciously try to think of non-T words to start your sentences with? Just for some balance and variety. Or is it just me?

Edit: I thought of also mentioning that the #2 letter I have this issue with is "I", but since T is the one that comes up more for me and that I try to avoid first, I left "I" out. Now I see that I should've mentioned it. More of you have this issue with "I" than with "T".

Comments

[cos]

Lots of sentences start with "the". In chronologies or logical arguments, "then" comes up. Subjects are often noun phrases introduces with "this" or "that". Another really common one is "to", introducing a point of view, or a goal. But your "passive tense" examples make no sense to me. There's no such thing as "passive tense", and if you're referring to "passive voice" then all of your examples are counterexamples because all of them are active voice.

Oh, let me clarify myself!

[diatom.livejournal.com]

Forgive me. I should have written "passive voice". "There is" is a very passive voice phrase, IMO: one removes the action-maker, attributing whatever is happening to some ethereal force. It's passive because you have removed the subject, the maker / force that is performing the action of the sentence.

I guess the problem with these phrases is really too much use of the verb "to be", at the end of the day. From where I come from, people say "passive tense" when one uses too much "is" / "are" / "has been". I guess the verb "to be" is passive, in pretty much all its forms. Maybe it should be known as the "passive verb"! But I'm pretty sure the people that said "passive tense" to me and around me were decent people, writers and teachers, and we understood each other. Maybe that was a regional thing...

Hope that clears things up for you. I would not agree that "there is" or "there are" are at all active, or counterexamples. They're passive because of non-attribution, which seems very simple and clear to me.

"There is a big cat in the road." v. "Henry dumped a big cat in the road."

"To", or "this" or "that", I know less about. But repeatedly using "to" at the start of a sentence seems sketchy. I'd call it "making your speech/writing patterns 'too theoretical'", but that's just my instinctive take on it. Maybe you're trying so hard to prove your point, in your writing, that you're getting bogged down in literary baggage, or in being officious.

I really don't know. Good luck!

Re: Oh, let me clarify myself!

[cos]

"Passive voice" has a very clear definition: It's when the grammatical subject of the sentence is not the agent of the verb in the sentence. For example, "my car was broken into". The subject is "my car", but the verb is "broken" and the car isn't the actor who did the breaking. In fact, in this sentence, the agent of the verb is completely missing, which is one of the main reasons to use passive voice: when you don't know who or what the verb's agent is, and they're not the focus of meaning anyway - you don't *want* to mention them, because you're talking about your car (which got broken into), not the people who broke into it.

That's another common reason for passive voice: even when you do mention the agent of the verb, you deliberately want to put the focus of the sentence on something else. For example, "while visiting Al-Aqsa Mosque, King Abdullah was shot by a Palestinian assassin." If this sentence appears in the context of a brief history of Jordan, in a paragraph describing the life and rule of Jordan's first king, it makes sense to keep the sentence focused on him, and what happened to him; rearranging that sentence into active voice would make it fit in more awkwardly, because it would look like you're writing about the assassin rather than writing about the king.

Sometimes, though, passive voice is useful for the opposite reason: to give you a way to emphasize the agent in particular. For example, "Some people get sued by their competitors, but this guy was sued by his own law firm!" The first half of that is active voice, but the second half is passive voice in order to emphasize who sued "this guy" even though he's the subject of the clause (which makes it a better sentence, because it's a cleaner contrast with the subject of the other clause, "some people").

BTW, look at the T-sentences in this comment. One of them even begins with one of your examples, "that is", though I abbreviated it: "That's another common reason for the passive voice:". This is active voice, of course. Whatever contortions you might go through to remove the verb "to be" from that sentence would leave you with one that does not express the point that sentence is there for. I put the paragraph break there for a reason, but I also wanted the next paragraph to clearly refer to the end of the previous one and make a point about it.

I know that a lot of style guides go on about avoiding what they term "passive", often without a clear or consistent definition of "passive", but IMO they're giving awful advice that they generally don't even follow themselves. If you're driving down the road and see a big cat ahead, "there's a big cat in the road!" is much better than trying to figure out an agent to stuff into your sentence as a subject.

Re: Oh, let me clarify myself!

[lindseykuper]

To add to what cos said (which is all true), a passive-voice version of "Henry dumped a big cat in the road" would be "A big cat was dumped in the road", or "A big cat was dumped in the road by Henry".

The passive voice comes up in technical writing pretty often. Here's an example I just saw:

The 'call' form maintains the call stack in the term syntax. A function call is rewritten with this form, and...

The "is rewritten with this form" part is the passive part. To change this sentence to active voice, I'd need to find out whatever caused the rewrite to happen. If that thing was the frobnicator widget, then I'd write:

The 'call' form maintains the call stack in the term syntax: The frobnicator widget rewrites a function call with this form, and...

But I might not want to do that. If the point of this sentence is merely to convey that a rewrite happens, I wouldn't want the reader to get bogged down in the details of what does the rewrite. In that case, I would do well to leave the passive voice in there.

I find that in technical writing, the main problem with the passive voice is that it makes it too easy to write about things happening without actually knowing what caused each thing to happen. So, as a writer, going through the mental exercise of trying to rearrange one's passive-voice sentences to use the active voice can help tighten up one's thinking a little, even if one actually ends up leaving the sentences in the passive voice because they work better that way.