grammar thing/style thing

[ritaxis]

So my writing group tells me that was and were are bad, not altogether, but need to be very sparely used. Afterwar has a lot of description and a lot of past progressive tense. So I'm trying to replace almost every incidence of was and were with other verb things.

But I want that past progressive.

I do think they're on to something, though the thing they're on to is not what they say it is ("sentences in the passive"). I have been struggling to make the story more robust and frightening, and I tend to fail, I think because of my own personality defects, really.

I think I've figured out something that might satisfy the need to liven the prose as well as my need for the past progressive: retaining the past progressive structure but replacing the auxiliary verb with an "active" verb. We'll see.

But I refuse to join them in calling sentences with the structure "He was a bureaucrat" or "He was pulling the wagon" passive. Passive is "He was called a bureaucrat" or "The wagon was being pulled by him." That's a fact of grammar, not an opinion about style.

Comments

[zeborah]

Gah! I blame Word for labelling every instance of was/were as passive.

Not sure what you mean by "retaining the past progressive structure but replacing the auxiliary verb with an "active" verb" - can you give an example? Because the auxiliary verb in past progressive is "was/were", I think, and "pulling" the main verb. <squint> Or something; I started leaking jargon as soon as I stopped studying linguistics; but anyway if was/were isn't the auxiliary then I don't know what is, and if you replace that with a different verb then it's not past progressive anymore.

In descriptions you can often use inflected verbs with a past progressive meaning, eg "The castle loomed" to mean "The castle was looming". But I think that works best with things that are necessarily static or almost so: by contrast "He pulled the wagon" doesn't mean the same thing as "He was pulling the wagon".

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Here's what I mean:

He was pulling the wagon becomes He strained at pulling the wagon Or He climbed, pulling the wagon. Or . . .
Which isn't really, grammatically, keeping the structure, because "pulling" is now doing a different grammatical job than before, but more properly I should have said I was retaining the participle and letting it do other things to keep the progressive feel while having more emotionally-charged words in the verb place.

It's not because I agree that there's something wrong with "was" and "were," it's because I'm willing to experiment with making the verbs denser.