Usable Words

My friend Tania took this photo of an official notice on the London Underground. It strikes me as a great example of atrociously bad mass-audience copywriting. In fact, there’s so much wrong with it that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s try.

Remember, you’re talking to EVERYONE.

If you’re writing something that’s going to be read by a big, diverse audience – every single commuter in the city, for example – keep in mind that everyone who reads it is going to assume, reasonably enough, that you’re talking to them.

From that perspective, the wording of this sign is horrible. It treats the entire body of commuters as one seething mass of repressed grievances, ready at any moment to burst into violence.

The person who chose the wording for the sign was probably assuming that the vast majority of readers – those who would never dream of assaulting a rail employee, no matter how late their train was – would just “self-exclude”. They’d read the sign and think “oh, that’s for violent people, not me” and be on their way.

But that’s not how people’s minds work, at least in modern Western societies. Even when a statement implies guilt – perhaps especially then – our first response is to assume it’s addressing us. A police officer yells “hey you!’ and we turn around, wondering what we’ve been caught at. (The philospher Louis Althusser called this “interpellation”.)

And because we don’t like being arbitrarily made to feel guilty, our second response – once we’ve worked out that we’re not the person being addressed – tends to be annoyance. So framing your rules and prohibitions in the imperative mood (“do this”, “don’t do that”), as a direct address to readers, is a good way to piss people off.

In fact, this kind of public address is a situation where (for once) you want to be as impersonal as possible. “Smoking is not permitted” is much better than “Don’t light up your filthy cancer sticks in here pal” precisely because it doesn’t address the reader directly (another win for the passive voice!).

This sign, on the other hand, reads like something one person would say to another, but in the worst possible way. It’s like one of the lines recited by a badly-trained service employee to a customer they perceive as “difficult”. (“Don’t take it out on me! It’s not my fault! I just work here! You’re not listening to me! I can’t help you!”) read more >

After such a long absence, I feel I owe you a post that will make you feel better about yourself. So this is about something you do all the time. It’s something people have been telling you is wrong, even though they do it all the time too: using the passive voice. The passive voice is a much maligned but perfectly legitimate part of the English language, and I want to help you make friends with it.

I’ve wanted to write in defence of the passive voice for a long time, but I was prompted into action by a post from Glenn at the Divine Write Copywriting Blog. Glenn points out a headline that borders on nonsensical – “Facebook Note Removes Juror from Trial” – and convincingly argues that it’s probably the result of an awkward attempt to rewrite something that started off in the passive voice.

Writers are often taught to avoid the passive voice, especially in things like headlines. Glenn refers to this as a “grammar rule”, which is the one point where I part company from him. The passive voice is a completely normal part of grammar; there’s no grammatical rule that says you shouldn’t use it.

This is a bit of a hot button for me, so I pedantically posted a comment correcting Glenn. Fortunately he took this very graciously, and we’re now Twitter buddies and everything (yes, I’ve succumbed – I’m @angusgmelb if you want to follow me). But as McKean’s Law (named after another friend of mine!) would have it, I made another mistake in my correction: I said the anti-passive thing was a “usage preference”, but it’s not really that either. What it is is a style guideline.

Grammar, usage, style: these are three different things, and the differences are important enough to insist on. That’s something I should probably save for a future post. But just to be going on with:

• A sentence can be either grammatical or ungrammatical. Therefore, grammar has “rules”. (Incidentally, this is something the so-called “prescriptive” and “descriptive” camps agree on. What they disagree on is how to decide what the rules are. If you’re under the false impression that descriptive linguists hate rules and believe that “anything goes” – or even if you’re not – please start reading Language Log immediately.)
• As for usage, word meanings evolve over time, but if we want to get along it’s a good idea not to say “up” when we mean “down”. Therefore, usage also has “rules,” but they change faster than the grammatical ones. (At least that’s my impression.)
• Style is different. Style is an aesthetic category, and aesthetics aren’t the kind of thing people reach consensus about. The most you can say is that style has guidelines. You can call these guidelines “rules” if you like, but they have no more authority than rules about what to wear with what, or what kind of knife and fork to use when. In other words, they’re the kind of rule that was made to be broken.

“Rules were made to be broken”, incidentally, is a pretty good example of a passive construction – a double passive construction, no less – that couldn’t possibly be “rewritten” in the active voice. Go on, try it.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because one thing that emerges from this whole discussion is that most people only have a vague understanding of what the passive voice actually is. So let me try to clarify. read more >