Weekend Wrinkle: Graduation and Writing

It’s the graduation “season.” I can’t help thinking of the parallels between academic graduation and completing a writing project.

• Writers often spend a long time working on a project, sometimes years – just like students pursuing a degree.
• Writers explore different aspects of their subjects to get to the final goal.
• When writers “finish” a project, they can’t help looking back and thinking they could have done something a little differently or put more effort into something.
• Writers often find it hard to move on from the environment and people they encountered throughout a project.
• Writers look forward to good things resulting from all the hard work they put in.
• When the project is done, writers move on to something new.
• Graduates and writers mark the end of one phase and the beginning of the next.

As we congratulate those students who have worked so hard to finally achieve the reward at the end of their studies, I want to remind writers to give themselves a pat on the back and a “great job” when they reach their own “graduation.”

Editors Against Passive Voice

I’m prejudiced. Yes, I admit that I hate passive voice.

Unfortunately, so many people out there just love passive voice. Leading the charge are academics and government workers. (I’m leaving out lawyers; that’s a totally hopeless verbal morass best ignored.)

Let me explain. Passive voice occurs when the thing or person a verb acts upon becomes the subject. We can usually tell it’s happening because a form of the verb to be with the past participle pops up:

The long, boring text in passive voice was read by the editor.

As an editor, I am obligated to try to convert writers to the active side. It’s a struggle. I tend to collapse in a heap after a long ordeal with passive voice, large clumps of my own hair peeking out through my clenched fingers, tears of frustration building in my eyes. (Is it possible for woman to end up looking like Perry White from the ’60s show Superman? I sure hope not!)

The problem is, we’re all programmed to think that writing in passive voice makes us sound “smart” since that is how all the mucky-mucks in academia write. If passive voice really were the “smart” way to write, we’d all read college textbooks for pleasure. (“The abnormal psychology book was read by me, and excitement was generated!”)

So many fall into the passive voice trap. One area is business writing where convoluted writing, along with jargon and trendy phrases (topics for another day and another tirade) can actually hurt the bottom line. No one in business has the time to decipher writing that seems to have stepped out of the 1700s where folks wrote in a form equivalent to a bad Latin translation.Time is money, and muddy, unclear writing causes confusion and mistakes.

Sure, sometimes we need to write in passive voice but only when the noun or pronoun taking the action is the important piece in the puzzle:

John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963.

How insidious is passive voice? When I was managing editor for a newspaper chain, I had one writer (who had a graduate degree, mind you) who consistently wrote in passive voice – for news stories! I constantly had to rewrite all that writer’s stories. Ticked me off big time!

“What’s the big deal?” you ask. “What’s so terribly wrong with sounding smart?”

It’s wrong because it’s selfish writing. People who are more concerned with sounding intelligent are full of themselves. We should write to clearly convey a message or a meaning. We write for the audience, not for ourselves. We should use passive voice only when necessary, not as the prevailing tone for all our writing.

Folks, use the active voice! It is so much more interesting and effective.

A Marriage Made in the Classroom

I recently showed my composition class an example of overblown writing. The paragraph was full of multi-syllabic words that pretty much required a dictionary to decipher.

I asked them what they thought of the paragraph.

“Sounds smart,” one said, a common response.

“But can you understand what the writer is saying?” I asked. As they shook their heads, I asked, “So how ‘smart’ is the writer?”

In business, especially in the digital age, clarity is important. People need to access information swiftly, so writers need to make their point clearly and quickly.

I wonder, though, if we do a disservice to our students when we put all our stress on academic writing. Learning the rigors of academic writing helps build research and organizational skills essential to good written communication. It also tends to encourage writing that is loaded with pretentious vocabulary, unnecessary wordiness, and passive voice as the students try to sound “smart.”

Most of my students are not headed toward careers in academia. They need to develop writing skills that will make them successful in the workplace. Even in business writing, they will need to beware the pitfalls of jargon and overused, trendy phrases.

How do I reconcile an academic-based syllabus with the needs of business-focused students? I stress that what we do in class is like the wind sprints football players do to get them ready for game day. I constantly try to point out how what they are learning is relevant to what they’ll need in the workplace.

I show them why good grammar is essential to keep the reader focused on ideas rather than mechanics. I demonstrate why they need to supply adequate supporting evidence for their ideas. We talk about how to write differently for different audiences and purposes.

One thing I try hard to do is to translate what we are learning into real-world applications. For instance, after learning to write descriptive essays, I have the students view a video of a work accident then ask them to write an incident report for their “supervisor.” Summary and response as well as persuasive essays are followed by students finding a job posting then writing a cover letter to apply for it.

I try to wed academic writing skills with workplace requirements. When I show my students that what they are learning in class will be useful in their careers, they see the benefit of working hard to hone their writing skills.