Archive for January, 2010

Grammar & Punctuation – active or passive?

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Using the passive voice has a number of disadvantages.
It tends to sound rather formal and remote:
Volunteers were sought to set up the tables.
It can lead to rather complicated expressions:
The opinions of staff and governors were sought and although there were some reservations it was decided that a questionnaire should be distributed to parents.
Sentence 1 would be better as:
They asked for volunteers to set up the tables.
Sentence 2 Would be simpler if it were made active:
We asked staff and governors for their views. Although not everyone agreed completely, we decided to send a questionnaire to parents.
On the other hand, the passive can make sentences shorter and clearer. For example, this:
She was run over by a car travelling at excessive speed and overtaking on the wrong side.
is better than:
A car travelling at excessive speed and overtaking on the wrong side ran her over.
The first sentence has a short subject She and is easy to follow. The subject of the second sentence is too long and we lose the sense before we get to the verb.
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Grammar & Punctuation – active voice.

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

TRANSITIVE VERBS (verbs that take an object) can be used in two ways, or ‘voices’: active and passive:
ACTIVE: The dog bit him.
PASSIVE: He was bitten by the dog.
Transitive verbs usually describe some kind of action. In the sentence The dog bit him, you have a person, thing, or idea that performs the action and one that is affected by it. The first is the subject The dog and the second the object him. When we put a sentence into the passive voice, the object him becomes the subject He. The original subject The dog becomes the agent and has the preposition by placed in front of it. In everyday writing the active voice is much more common than the passive.
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Grammar & Punctuation – acronym.

Monday, January 25th, 2010

An ABBREVIATION composed of the first letters of other words so that the abbreviation itself forms a word. For example:
CRASH: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities.
Aids: acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Acronyms are treated just like ordinary words in a sentence, and may be composed of all capital letters, or of an initial capital followed by small letters. For example:
Of 34 mothers who gave birth to children with Aids at his hospital, only four had any symptoms of the disease.
Daily Telegraph
An abbreviation consisting of initial letters pronounced separately is called an initialism. For example:
WHO BBC .
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Grammar & punctuation – abstract noun.

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Noun can be divided into two groups: concrete and abstract. Concrete nouns refer to people, places, and things that can be experienced using our five senses. Abstract nouns refer to thoughts, ideas, and imaginings that cannot:
CONCRETE ABSTRACT
man manliness
table tabulation
author authorship
Too many obscure abstractions can make a piece of writing difficult to read. See, for example, the sentence in bold type in the following extract:
Such people may be keen to work, but unable to find jobs because none are available in their occupation or in their geographical area, so that retraining or rehousing would be necessary to increase the chances of employment. It could also be that there is a general deficiency of demand for labour throughout the economy, in which case the involuntarily unemployed workers will face fierce competition for the jobs that do become available.
A general deficiency of demand for labour throughout the economy is just a pompous and long-winded way of saying that there aren’t enough jobs to go round. On the other hand there are also many everyday abstract nouns that are simple and direct:
happiness failure truth beauty
It would be perverse to try to avoid abstract nouns such as these, so the use of abstract nouns in writing is a question of judgement.
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Grammar & Punctuation – abbreviations.

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

The presentation of abbreviations in writing raises two questions:
 Should I use full stops?
 Do I use capital or small letters?
Full stops
 Normally if you use initial (first) letters to represent words there is no need to put a full stop after them:
UK BBC
 In North America, however, it is more common to use a full stop (or ‘period’) after initial letters.
 If the abbreviation consists of the first and last letters of the word, then you do not use a full stop:
Mr Ltd
 If the abbreviation consists of the first part of a word, you put a full stop at the end:
Wed. Dec.
Capital or small letters
Normally if you use the first letter of a word in an abbreviation a capital letter is used:
HND BAA HSBC
One well-known exception to this rule is the abbreviation plc for public limited company, although this is also sometimes written PLC.
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