An Open Letter to English Professors

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.