A fellow scholar (!!) and a native speaker of English writes me the following email:
Dear Clarissa, the reason why you received this paperwork is due to the fact that. . .
Is there a reason why she couldn’t have simply said, “You received the paperwork because. . .”? Or is that reason also due to some fact?
As you can understand, I’m grading essays right now and this makes me ultra-sensitive to crappy, clunky, miserable prose.
Mmm sounds like a fairly common expression (in the UK anyway) despite being a bit clumsy. It might be a little more like spoken English than written but to me it seems that beating around the bush a little is fairly standard and being too abrupt can sound rude (when spoken in any case).
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Putting in ‘due to the fact that’ suggests that x reason is incontrovertible – or that the speaker wants you to think it is anyway. Generally indicative of defensiveness or, alternately there is something more to the matter that the speaker doesn’t want you to focus on.
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The entire “the reason is due to the fact” sounds wrong. “This is due to the fact” is one thing but “the reason for this is due to the fact” is already even more convoluted.
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It’s a metaphorical equivalent of “um…” or “er….”
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I know, I have to struggle through endless “basically, ‘actually’, ‘so”, “just”, etc, in every student essay to get to the point they are trying to make. Sometimes I yell, “Just say it already!” while I grade the essays.
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Yeah. WordPress edit is very good for picking up those expressions.
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Maybe I should direct students to use WordPress for this purpose. The passive voice, too.
“The short stories that are being analyzed are defined by the fact that they are seen as basically. . .”
That’s a sentence I just read in a student essay. I haven;t even finished reading it because I;m about to fall asleep.
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heheheh. I’m a bit prone to writing in this way whenever I’m still digesting my thoughts and writing at the same time. It makes a difference if you already have a clear idea of what you want to say before beginning to write. Definitely, send them to WordPress and get them to select the editing options that most of them would benefit from.
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“The passive voice, too.”
AFAICT, in scientific writing, using passive voice is routine. I assumed that this would be the same for all scholarly writing. Is my assumption incorrect concerning the humanities? Or is the actual problem merely the convolutedness and multiple embeddings that take too long to get to the point? (I assume from the context that there is no attempt to deceive or be evasive by creating a sentence without an agent, as in “Mistakes were made.”)
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Have you seen the sentence I gave earlier in this thread as an example? Four passive voices in one sentence! And every sentence is this way! 38 essays!!
Ok, I feel better now. 🙂 🙂
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““The short stories that are being analyzed are defined by the fact that they are seen as basically. . .””
– Is this a “routine” use of the passive voice in English, Rob F? Seriously? Should I grade this as good writing?
This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. Am I being too harsh when I grade this as very poor writing?
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I would consider too convoluted and with too many layers of embeddings to be written well.
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Going for a walk on a bright Sunday. Is this good writing?. To be honest, I never understood the insistence on avoiding the passive voice in scientific writing. Writing is an art and, as such, free use of grammar voice and expression combined with clarity should not only be allowed but emphasized.
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I always tell my students that they will deserve the right to their own voice and their own personal writing style after they master the rules of conventionaly good writing. Do you believe that ““The short stories that are being analyzed are defined by the fact that they are seen as basically. . .”” is good writing? Would you enjoy reading 38 essays that are all written this way?
It’s easy to proclaim one’s own principles but what would you do if this were the kind of writing you had to read every single day?
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Was the email sent to you by a fellow scholar for communcating an idea? Or were you supposed to give it a passing or failing grade because of the way it was written?
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Ah, I see we are up for another round of whether I can be allowed to express my opinions on my own blog.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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