Anxious about your writing? Trust your tongue more than “grammar rules”

To get our audience focusing on our message, we should trust our tongue more than books of grammar rules. If that all sounds fine and you want to save time, skip straight to the part on why and how this works.

But if you’re wondering why the rules don’t work, or if you like seeing establishment figures dethroned (sorry Orwell), then read on.

Why do we resort to grammar guides?

Many of us worry that our writing mistakes will distract readers from our message. We worry more if those readers are senior to us, or if we don’t know much about them, or if we’re writing in a second language.

Who worries about their writing? Nearly everyone, from managers to post-doc researchers and professors!

For help, we look to style guides. They give us convenient rules of thumb.

Sometimes the rules of thumb are useful, such as “The abbreviation etc. always ends with a period, regardless of any additional punctuation that may follow.”

But the guides go further, telling us how to order words, to work on real grammar. Here, they try to keep things simple, with rules like “In a nonrestrictive clause, use which.”

They spread these simple rules to bigger topics, for example “omit needless words”.

Such slogans seem reassuring but somehow don’t help in practice.

How to tell if a rule has substance? We can test it against three criteria:

1. It should be based on reasons. Those reasons should make sense to us.
   

2. It should be not only rational but usable. One indicator would be if the writers of the rule used it consistently themselves.
   

3. Any negative effects of the rule should be outweighed by the positive ones.

   
   

Remembering a rule takes mental effort. It needs to be worthwhile overall.

Let’s test one example rule: the common one to “avoid the passive voice”. As a reminder, the passive voice looks like this:

Or this:

The passive voice starts phrases with the person or thing that something was done to. Like “mistakes”, or “the war”.

And the verb phrase follows it: “were made” or “was caused by…”

Then, it may conclude with the doer or agent, such as “German troops”. But it doesn’t have to have a doer. The phrase “mistakes were made” omits who made the mistakes.

In this article about grammar rules, why am I focusing on the passive voice? Because it goes straight to the heart of grammar, the relationship between word order and our minds. Choices around punctuation and the use of single words are often more stylistic and superficial.

“Avoid the passive voice” — do the reasons make sense?

Reason #1: Avoiding responsibility

Why do style guides say to avoid the passive voice? One reason is that it’s sometimes used to avoid responsibility. Or rather I should say (actively): politicians and other dubious groups use it to avoid responsibility.

If I say “mistakes were made”, perhaps you won’t quiz me too hard about who made those mistakes, and why. In theory, the active voice would force me to say “we made mistakes”.

But hey! There are ways to weasel out with the active voice too. If you can follow this sentence through to the end, you still don’t have an idea of who messed up:

We might accept that by allowing us to omit the agent, the passive voice makes this weaselly writing easier.

Are there any times when omitting the agent helps our writing? Well, yes. Sometimes we really need to focus on the action and the act-ee, because the one who did it isn’t known, or isn’t so important.

“My phone’s been stolen!” says a lot. Stolen by whom? Well, presumably a robber. Saying so adds words without value.

So far, we haven’t justified the rule to “avoid the passive voice”. It might be just as good to have a rule saying “Admit responsibility!”

Why else is the passive voice “bad”?

Reason #2: the passive voice is harder to process?

Grammar guides give examples like this: “A ball was kicked by the boy.” They point out how that sounds less natural than just saying “The boy kicked a ball”.

Such examples look comical and awkward next to the active form. For one thing, it’s clear that the passive uses more words (“A ball was kicked by the boy” is two words longer.) Normally, adding words makes a sentence harder to read.

For another thing, if we saw this scenario in real life, we would see the boy, then the kicking, and then the ball that was kicked. A popular guide says:

How “usual” is this sequence of events, though? What if “A boy kicked a ball”, but then “the ball was promptly chased by the neighbour’s dog and cornered”?

In the second phrase, we are following the ball with our eyes, then we suddenly notice the dog chasing it, then both ball and dog come to a halt. That is how we make sense of those events in that context. And so in that second phrase, the passive voice works well.

Studies actually disagree on whether the passive voice is generally harder to process at all. But we don’t have to look to artificial test scenarios to figure out the answer. We can dive a little deeper to understand the reasons that it sometimes works better.

What makes the passive voice easier to process sometimes?

Sentences flow best when they start with information we know already, and then add new information. Or at least, when they start with a topic, and then comment on it. This pattern is common in many languages.

Where the topic is the one who something is done to, the passive voice helps to order that information naturally, topic-first. It doesn’t just work with simple subject matter. Here’s another example:

In the second sentence, the word “It” is the grammatical object. “It” refers to the second world war. It’s the topic; the thing we are talking about; the thing we know already.

Imagine that instead, we follow the rule to avoid the passive voice. The second sentence feels awkward:

We have to wait until the end of the second sentence to learn what “The invasion of Poland” had to do with the first sentence.

Guides on the passive voice, including the one I quoted earlier, say we should avoid it because it “increases cognitive load”. In other words, it makes us work too hard. But of these two paragraphs about the second world war, it’s the one without passive voice that makes us work too hard. The passive voice smooths the flow.

Why isn’t it easy to just mentally save the concept of “the second world war” until we see its connection to “the invasion of Poland”? If our minds worked like computers, we could store that information in a variable until needed.

But our minds are very far from being computers. Our amazing abilities to understand language are even more amazing when you realize we are listening through a very narrow window of attention.

Across languages, speakers produce between about 10-15 meaningful sounds per second. We don’t notice it in our own languages, because we’re so used to assembling them on the fly. But when we listen to other languages, they sound incredibly fast.

And they are fast — so much so that if our mind slips, we miss meaning. We have one chance only to hear and store the information. Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater called this the “now-or-never bottleneck”:

We are not recoding these sounds onto paper but clustering or chunking them into bigger units of meaning as we go.

It is neat to chunk the concept “the second world war”, into the single word “it”. By contrast, to force the brain to wait while new information is fed into it, to wait until the very end of the next sentence for the relationship to resolve — is painful. (I just did it there, by leaving the main verb until the end of the sentence. Sorry for the pain.)

So… we know now that the passive voice can really make readers’ job easier. But sometimes it is really used awkwardly.

Do you ever get newsletters from local community groups? What is it about the language there that tries so hard and flops? The writers, so generous with their time, have hearts of gold and fingers of lead.

Two typical specimens:

Surely here we need to help? A rule against the passive can only be a good thing?

Well, can it?

Is the rule usable?

The writers of comunity newsletters must have seen the rules against the passive. Presumably in school they were exposed to them? Perhaps they have seen Strunk and White’s advice to “Use the active voice” in the classic grammar guide, The Elements of Style?

Well, if they have seen Strunk and White, they might be confused. As Geoffrey Pullum famously, entertaingly pointed out in 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, three out of four of S&W’s examples of “passive voice” are actually active! Apparently it is not always easy to distinguish active from passive forms, even if you are a virtual god of grammar.

Even the great writer George Orwell slipped into contradiction, in Politics and the English Language:

(In case you wonder if this was ironic, the rest of the paragraph is also passive, and clearly not intended as parody.)

How then are busy volunteers supposed to use this rule? How are we supposed to use it, even busier as we are?

Perhaps things are clearer now though? Do more recent guides identify the passive voice successfully?

There is some nice, flowing writing in a piece called “Your Grade School Teachers Were Right: Avoid Using the Passive Voice”. At the end, the writer advises us to:

But she seems not to see that she is using the passive voice herself — in a very natural way. See if you can spot it:

Yes, it’s the phrase “the passive voice is employed”. It works well! We don’t need the agent, the doer in that phrase. We know from the context that the doer of the action is a writer.

Ironically, the paragraph works less as a warning against the passive voice, than as an nice example of flowing style.

Why does the writing flow that way? Because the writer is using her long experience to write smoothly, drawing on all the language resources she has to suit the situation. No doubt, this is how constructions such as the passive voice start to appear in language in the first place. All linguists of any note agree that language evolves as a complex system without much deliberate design behind it. (See, for example, Christiansen and Chater in The Language Game).

So the rule against the passive voice is hard to apply in practice. But perhaps it is still better than having no rule?

Is the rule helpful overall?

To recap, we’ve seen that sometimes the passive voice goes with unsmooth writing, or even writing that’s intended to avoid responsibility.

But it also goes with efficient writing that focuses our attention on what’s important. And writing that flows from topic to comment, building a scenario across several sentences.

Perhaps we need a more nuanced rule? Joseph Williams writes:

The book then continues by showing how to use the answers to choose active or passive.

But such rules seem hard to follow. They have a really limited effect. You need to really understand them; see again the examples above. And you need to pay constant attention! You need the time and leisure. Then finally, a rule is nearly always provisional. It doesn’t cover all the cases, and as grammar slowly changes over time, it doesn’t keep up.

Is the passive voice rule an exception?

In fact, many of the rules in grammar guides are dubious. Pullum’s 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice is amusing and true. Beard, Park, Wright, and Regal’s Rethinking the teaching of grammar from the perspective of corpus linguistics brings data and references to prove how incomplete and plain inaccurate a lot of prescriptive grammar advice is. (For example, the advice to always use a singular “be” verb with words like each and either. In reality, it’s the context that determines whether a singular or plural verb works best.)

But perhaps reading a grammar rule is better than nothing?

Not always. It can block us. It can make us more nervous, or tangle us up:

It’s not that all grammar study is unhelpful. But, rather than looking for safe rules of syntax, we can learn why languages follow certain patterns, and how you might use those patterns for different effects:

Where do we learn about the real principles of grammar in that way? The Beard, Park, Wright, and Regal piece has some good references. For a less academic source, Joseph Williams’s Style has practical advice, including how to neatly flow from topic to comment across sentences and paragraphs.

Williams can be trusted to not over-egg the “grammar rules”. In another work, he points out that if you look for errors, you’ll find them, and the only rules you should worry about are those that will distract regular readers: the readers who are looking for meaning and not mistakes. (The Phenomenology of Error).

But even Williams omits a key technique. What do he and many less capable grammarians miss?

The best advice: trust your tongue

We’re writing to make an impact, right? That means that our words need to sink in clearly. One of the best ways to write clearly and strongly is to make sure it sounds good.

How? By reading aloud while revising. This is nothing new — many great writers and academics recommend it, and it works.

But what does this have to do with grammar? Surprisingly, reading aloud also helps us notice issues with grammar. (It also helps pick up the correct-but-really-awkward constructions we sometimes write when distracted by grammar rules.)

In a wonderful book on how speech helps writing, Peter Elbow says:

*By “conservative readers”, Elbow means those who are easily distracted by seeming rule-breaking, when others would not notice. Of course this does not imply anything about politics.

In this book, “Vernacular Eloquence”, Elbow brings deep research and writing talent to build our own confidence in writing. (Unless marked otherwise, the rest of the quotations in this section are from that book.)

Don’t get Elbow wrong: he does see the value of polishing our writing to avoid distracting readers. But he sees greater value in trusting our speech to help unblock writing and give it power.

One thing he shows: how natural speech often flows “topic-first”. Known information, the thing we’re talking about, goes before new information. (See above for examples, under What makes the passive voice easier to process sometimes?)

Showing the value of topic-first writing, Elbow uses Joseph Williams’s “Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace”. But he shows how even Williams, such a good writer and linguist, gets stuck without the sense of the voice.

For example, Williams over-extends a rule to keep adjectives with the things that they describe. He changes the perfectly good sentence:

Into the less natural-sounding:

Elbow believes that Williams distrusts speech-like writing. In Elbow’s view, and mine, that is the wrong direction. Why?

3 reasons why speaking helps our grammar

#1 In speech, we naturally produce quite good grammar

We tend to speak in little chunks of meaningful sound. These “intonation units” represent the amount of information that we can pay attention to at one time.

When we use speaking to test writing, so that every sentence feels and sounds “right”, the grammar tends to just work:

#2 We learn styles by hearing and speaking them

Children don’t learn to “speak like writing”. Elbow talks about a style called Educated Written English, a style that basically won’t distract readers or “get you in trouble”. It’s a style that is no-one’s natural speech. So how do we learn it?

Not by studying rules in books, clearly. But you can get used to it by reading it, and especially reading out loud:

Even those who haven’t practised much can use a different style by imitation.

#3 Reading out loud is a wonderful way to spot weak points

It’s hard to edit our own writing when we simply look at it. We can miss obvious things like duplicate words, missing words, typos, and other inattentive errors. It’s even harder to spot the weak points where things don’t join well.

Somehow, speaking words, even our own, lets us hear them afresh, as if someone else had written them. That gives us the space to improve them.

Does speaking words help people who aren’t very familiar with the style they’re trying for? Yes still.

How to improve our own writing by speaking?

Follow these steps:

1. Prepare by reading things that use the style you’re aiming for. The more you interact with that style you’re aiming for, the easier it will be to use it for your own writing. Preferably read texts aloud, or at least sound them out in your head. Notice bits you like. Actually, even if you read things you don’t like the style of, it won’t hurt. You will notice the bits that don’t work, and start to think what you could do better.
   

2. When you start writing something new, try speaking your ideas out loud first (recording them if you like, or using voice transcription). Or, practice writing without thinking too much, as if you’re speaking onto the page. The point is to try to connect your natural voice to the written words as directly as possible. If you are writing something challenging in a second language, maybe try drafting in your first language first of all. Get words on the page in the most natural way you can. Speaking onto the page gives you better material to start with, even though you’ll want to edit it later.
   

3. When revising, read your words out loud, and see what sounds good and where it’s not smooth. Ideally, read to another person, or at least out loud to yourself. If you have to read silently (in your head), that’s better than nothing. Do you feel that you don’t have time to revise? That’s OK. Just remember the times when your words were misunderstood, or you wished you could have rewritten something. Perhaps a quick re-read wouldn’t hurt?
   

4. When something trips you up, try playing with the words and their order to see what sounds better. Elbow again: writers “don’t need the ability to magically generate elegant sentences; they just need to work out alternative versions—even randomly by trial and error—and test them against their criteria of clarity and strength.”

   
   

Grammar follows natural patterns. These patterns change depending on the situation, on the speaker, on the style, and over time as well. It’s interesting to learn about the patterns, to give us more options to express meaning. But we will never keep up, and rules will never quite match what works in practice.

Opinions on “correct grammar” aren’t worth a lot. (Data on styles and patterns is worth more, but it is still hard to use in practice.) If we take rules too seriously, we end up out-thinking our tongues. Ultimately, great writers and beginners must learn to trust their sense of sound.

Appendix: use quick references for final polishing

Something all these writers agree on: we do need to stick to some norms of punctuation and word usage. These norms don’t always come from the organic development of language; some are just arbitrary choices that somehow stuck (such as punctuation inside double-quotes). But it would distract readers if we broke them, so it’s easiest to follow the rules in these cases.

As they are abitrary, and they may change over time anyway, there is no point reading great long explanations. A quick reference guide is fine to remind us.

Peter Elbow likes a classic guide: Gavin and Sabin’s Reference Manual for Stenographers and Typists. You can still find the core of that book in the Sabin’s The Gregg Reference Manual: A Manual of Style, Grammar, Usage, and Formatting, although you might want to skip the later additions with grammar opinions.

Another option is the Merriam-Webster Guide to Style. I have a copy. A scanned version is available to borrow from the Internet Archive (apparently legitimately). Merriam-Webster also has an online grammar and usage site, with some references on spelling and wording.

Reference guides like this do help you stick to the conventions, at least the easily articulated and understood ones. But the conventions are a piece of “polite” culture floating on a shifting, organically evolving and infinitely rich broth of natural language. To try to tame language is to ladle soup with your hands.