I have a
question for anyone who is or was ever a professor of English. Do you ever get
sick of reading being verb replacements?
Words such
as:
Holds,
held, will hold
Remains,
remained, will remain
Exists,
existed, will exist
Lies, lay,
will lie
Because I
am excessively bored, uninspired, and unenthused by my own propensity to use
one of these words when a simple being verb would do quite nicely in its place.
Being verbs
aren't the only victims. How about the not-so-subtle and entirely clunky
evasions of the passive voice? What about the infamous "[insert
antecedent] with which [insert
verb]" construction. So much runaround in an attempt simply to put a
preposition in its proper place.
Students
are sometimes a lazy class of creatures, which yes,
I admit it, sometimes carries over into our writing. And yes, being verbs convey a restricted meaning
which do sometimes inappropriately limit a subject to its corresponding object.
I would toss the passive voice in the same category: to use the subject of a
sentence as the object of the verb does frequently limit the power and
precision of a sentence. Yes, the ease of their use means that these
grammatical constructions suffer from overuse
due to the laziness or sheer exhaustion of students who have multiple essays
due within the next twenty-four hours, with none of them finished and nowhere
near enough energy to care. Those conditions do not denote skilled composition;
being verbs, passive voice, and prepositions directly before periods only
exacerbate the problem.
However,
those professors who universally and rigidly banish the employment of these
constructions create yet another problem that they then have to deal with. When
students cannot use being verbs or the passive voice, and must continually
restructure sentences that naturally convey their ideas in order to prevent the
dreaded prepositional misplacement, they are deprived of the opportunity to
communicate their thoughts in a more natural, clear, and stylistically
stimulating way.
Having
afflicted myself with more than seven years of Latin, I can attest to this
fact: Cicero, one of the greatest rhetoricians to walk this earth, took
absolutely no issue with a full and extensive employment of the passive voice. Yet
nobody criticizes him. If you're going to tell your students to write like
Cicero, I'd suggest loosening the cords. By all means, mark it off when it's
laziness! But when the message of the composition is more naturally articulated
or emphasized by the careful placement of a being verb or the passive voice--or
a being verb in the passive voice--let it alone.
Best
wishes,
Nicole
P.S. The
"prepositions are not words to end sentences with" rule is just dumb
and should be forever stricken from all grammar curricula. Colloquial English
has long permitted its users to end sentences with prepositions and the formal
adherence to its prohibition causes clunkiness and ultimately impedes the
clarity of its syntax.
