What Everybody Knows
The more I think about the pronouncement that the word "was" automatically makes a sentence passive voice, the more it bothers me. Not just the fact that it's bad linguistics, not just the fact that, when coupled with the idea that passive voice is inherently bad, it cuts off a whole range of constructions that aren't passives, particularly the progressive forms (which deal with ongoing and habitual activity) and the copula, or even what it says about the state of education in relation to teaching of the fundamentals of grammar (both in the specifics of prestige-dialect English and of language in general as a phenomenon of human communication).
It's how guidelines that started as good advice can take a life of their own and become rules that run straight over a cliff. It's how things that "everybody knows" can persist in the face of clear factual information, to the point that people will end friendships, even blacklist people, rather than even consider that the facts are not on their side.
Back in the early 1990's, there was a period when the "was makes a sentence passive" somehow got expanded to the idea that all English verbal forms that required auxiliary verbs were bad writing and should be eliminated from one's writing. To me it was ridiculous to flatten all the fine distinctions of the nature and timing of action down to simple past and simple present -- and it felt like yet another part of trying to smash all writing down from a thick, juicy hamburger to a thin little cracker, and then browbeat and shame everyone into proclaiming that thin crackers were Just Wonderful and big juicy hamburgers were for vulgarians (right along with the attitude that all adverbs are Evil, and even adjectives are suspect -- which if followed to its logical extreme would reduce all sentences to nouns and verbs, with perhaps a few function words grudgingly tolerated).
Of course back in those days traditional publishing was still the only game in town if you wanted to have a career in writing, as opposed to a hobby for your spare time, on which you might spend some money to have copies printed for friends, family and whoever you could hand-sell them to at conventions. So everyone was desperately trying to figure out the shibboleths that would make the difference between the treasured acceptance and yet another rejection in the ever-growing pile. This led to a lot of obsession over minutia that were probably not nearly as important or productive as many struggling writers were led to think by those handing out advice -- and thus a lot of toiling over Every Precious Word and ended up with pages of perfectly-turned sentences that were as dull as dishwater, stories that had all the life suctioned right out of them by hyperfocus on perfect glistening prose.
I'm wondering if some of this obsession with eliminating even the slightest whiff of "passive voice" may have grown out of a certain kind of business writing advice that's obsessed with "action words." Back in the 90's there were a lot of resumé writing clinics telling people to replace all their noun-focused job responsibilities with verb-centered ones: instead of "manager of ...," write "managed...," etc. It was supposed to make the job applicant look more like a go-getter and thus a more desirable employee in a very tight job market -- although there were no studies or other evidence of hiring patterns to back it up. It just became something Everybody Knows, until nobody would dare to send out a resumé or cover letter that wasn't crammed with "action words."
Not that the advice is necessarily useless when brought to fiction writing -- as long as it doesn't become an end unto itself, or an obsessive focus to the point that writers become paralyzed over their word choices, unable to get a story out for fear of having their hands smacked for the breach of one or another shibboleth. I can see the utility of a writing exercise (perhaps a brief passage of narrative prose in response to a prompt such as a picture of several people interacting) that involves using or avoiding certain constructions, including certain auxiliary verbs, or any adverbs, etc, as a way of stretching one's skills. But when they become absolutes, when certain kinds of words and verbal constructions are condemned out of hand, it can actually do more harm than good.
At least now we do have indie, so there's no longer the sneaking suspicion that these things are just a way to "thin the herd" so they can quickly and easily pare a slushpile down to a manageable size (OMG, there's an adverb, grab a rejection slip and throw it in the SASE and read the next MS. and there's a "was," so rejection slip and off to the next -- lather, rinse, repeat and you can get through five or six hundred manuscripts in a couple of hours with very little reading).
It's how guidelines that started as good advice can take a life of their own and become rules that run straight over a cliff. It's how things that "everybody knows" can persist in the face of clear factual information, to the point that people will end friendships, even blacklist people, rather than even consider that the facts are not on their side.
Back in the early 1990's, there was a period when the "was makes a sentence passive" somehow got expanded to the idea that all English verbal forms that required auxiliary verbs were bad writing and should be eliminated from one's writing. To me it was ridiculous to flatten all the fine distinctions of the nature and timing of action down to simple past and simple present -- and it felt like yet another part of trying to smash all writing down from a thick, juicy hamburger to a thin little cracker, and then browbeat and shame everyone into proclaiming that thin crackers were Just Wonderful and big juicy hamburgers were for vulgarians (right along with the attitude that all adverbs are Evil, and even adjectives are suspect -- which if followed to its logical extreme would reduce all sentences to nouns and verbs, with perhaps a few function words grudgingly tolerated).
Of course back in those days traditional publishing was still the only game in town if you wanted to have a career in writing, as opposed to a hobby for your spare time, on which you might spend some money to have copies printed for friends, family and whoever you could hand-sell them to at conventions. So everyone was desperately trying to figure out the shibboleths that would make the difference between the treasured acceptance and yet another rejection in the ever-growing pile. This led to a lot of obsession over minutia that were probably not nearly as important or productive as many struggling writers were led to think by those handing out advice -- and thus a lot of toiling over Every Precious Word and ended up with pages of perfectly-turned sentences that were as dull as dishwater, stories that had all the life suctioned right out of them by hyperfocus on perfect glistening prose.
I'm wondering if some of this obsession with eliminating even the slightest whiff of "passive voice" may have grown out of a certain kind of business writing advice that's obsessed with "action words." Back in the 90's there were a lot of resumé writing clinics telling people to replace all their noun-focused job responsibilities with verb-centered ones: instead of "manager of ...," write "managed...," etc. It was supposed to make the job applicant look more like a go-getter and thus a more desirable employee in a very tight job market -- although there were no studies or other evidence of hiring patterns to back it up. It just became something Everybody Knows, until nobody would dare to send out a resumé or cover letter that wasn't crammed with "action words."
Not that the advice is necessarily useless when brought to fiction writing -- as long as it doesn't become an end unto itself, or an obsessive focus to the point that writers become paralyzed over their word choices, unable to get a story out for fear of having their hands smacked for the breach of one or another shibboleth. I can see the utility of a writing exercise (perhaps a brief passage of narrative prose in response to a prompt such as a picture of several people interacting) that involves using or avoiding certain constructions, including certain auxiliary verbs, or any adverbs, etc, as a way of stretching one's skills. But when they become absolutes, when certain kinds of words and verbal constructions are condemned out of hand, it can actually do more harm than good.
At least now we do have indie, so there's no longer the sneaking suspicion that these things are just a way to "thin the herd" so they can quickly and easily pare a slushpile down to a manageable size (OMG, there's an adverb, grab a rejection slip and throw it in the SASE and read the next MS. and there's a "was," so rejection slip and off to the next -- lather, rinse, repeat and you can get through five or six hundred manuscripts in a couple of hours with very little reading).