To Be Verbs

[NOIRTRASH]

http://writingcommons.org/open-text/style/sentence-structure/101-eliminate-to-be-verbs

Plenty here lard their wares with these static critters.

 

[TxRad]

Too be or not too be....

An interesting question but no lard in sight.

 

[Serafina1210]

Plenty of languages have no equivalent of "to be," and they get along fine. Ours, however, requires it for certain things, and one can't easily go a paragraph without it. Here's James's hero, Raymond Chandler, with probably the most famous paragraph he ever wrote:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Five instances of the verb "to be" (past indicative singular "was") in eighty-four words.

 

[jomar]

Active is usually preferred, but passive has its place.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Active is usually preferred, but passive has its place.

When the POV speaker is passive

 

[jomar]

When the POV speaker is passive

Don't know what you mean by this. The POV can be active or passive. As Serafina points out, passive worked for Chandler in the opening. It's a device.

 

[Serafina1210]

Active is usually preferred, but passive has its place.

"To be" has lots of uses besides making the passive voice. In the Chandler passage I quoted there is not one passive verb.

 

[RandyVicar]

Sorry, but I'm not buying this. From the page linked:

Sample: According to the certification theory, there is no intrinsic relation between creativity and IQ.

Revision: Certification theory posits no intrinsic relation between creativity and IQ.

Not only does the proposed revision not mean the same as the sample, its proposed verb choice ("posits") is a lousy choice that makes the sentence weaker, not stronger. The sentence's meaning is changed is because "is" is exactly the verb that is needed in this case.

Corrected Revision: Certification theory posits THERE IS no intrinsic relation between creativity and IQ.

"To be" verbs are weak. But sometimes nothing else will do. There is no stronger way of saying "Dogs are mammals."

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Don't know what you mean by this. The POV can be active or passive. As Serafina points out, passive worked for Chandler in the opening. It's a device.

Passive characters don't say UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHER FUCKER! Nor PUT OUT OR GET OUT, BITCH. They act and look and talk passive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fc36Hc2n2s

 

[jomar]

"To be" has lots of uses besides making the passive voice. In the Chandler passage I quoted there is not one passive verb.

Was too!

 

[Serafina1210]

Was too!

Where? I count three instances of "was" as copula, governing what old-fashioned grammar calls a "predicate nominative," and two of "was" + present participle making a progressive. No passives.

A lot of people don't know what a passive is: even Saints Strunk and White got it wrong. A passive consists of the verb "to be" (or sometimes "get") plus a past participle. What's that? It's the form of the verb that usually looks like a past tense but isn't: for some classes of verbs it has a different form:

I wuz robbed.
You've been taken for a ride.
I hope you're hanged!
She was driven to despair.

Functionally, what the passive does is make what would be the object of an active verb into the subject:

Passive: We're going to be slaughtered.
Active: They're going to slaughter us.

 

[jomar]

"I was wearing..." instead of "I wore...", but the "was" fits better in the paragraph.

 

[Serafina1210]

"I was wearing..." instead of "I wore...", but the "was" fits better in the paragraph.

"I was wearing" is not a passive, but past progressive (indicating ongoing action).

 

[NOIRTRASH]

The passive voice is a grammatical construction (specifically, a "voice"). The noun or noun phrase that would be the object of an active sentence (such as Our troops defeated the enemy) appears as the subject of a sentence with passive voice (e.g. The enemy was defeated by our troops).

 

[jomar]

"I was wearing" is not a passive, but past progressive (indicating ongoing action).

Okay.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Okay.

Past progressive is very popular with writers here, moreso than simple past