Teaching the Passive Voice

This afternoon at Maryborough Education Centre, where I'm working as a teaching and learning coach, a group of teachers discussed the need to explicitly teach grammar, and we talked about using grammar in the context of students' writing. Yesterday I worked with Debbie Long, a science teacher, using shared writing strategy for students to write a scientific report. One aspect we covered was that this genre of writing should be in the passive voice. So here's a piece from ReadWriteThink.org

Vignette: Teaching the Passive Voice
To help students understand sentence structure, some teachers get physical.

Here are two ways to dramatize the passive voice. I stand at one side of the room and throw my keys on the floor, telling the class to make me a sentence about what I just did and to begin the sentence with my name. I always get “Ms. Van Goor threw her keys on the floor.” I smile and write the sentence on the board.

VG: And the subject of the sentence is?
Class: Ms. Van Goor.
VG: Right! And the verb?
Class: Threw.
VG: Right again.

Now I pick up my keys and do the same thing again, but this time I tell them they must begin the sentence with The keys. It takes only a few minutes longer for them to get “The keys were thrown on the floor by Ms. Van Goor.” I write that sentence on the board also.

VG: And the subject is?
Class: The keys.
VG: Right! And the verb?
Class: (This takes longer, several tries, but eventually someone says it) Were thrown.
VG: Right. Now, in the first sentence, was the subject (I underline the subject once) doing what the verb (I underline the verb twice) described?
Class: Yes.
VG: Was the subject active, doing something?
Class: Yes.
VG: OK, how about the second sentence? Did the subject (I underline it once) do what the verb (I underline it twice) described?
Class: (much more slowly!) No-o-
VG: Was the subject active, doing something?
Class: No-o-.
VG: Or was the subject passive, just sitting there letting something else do something to it?
Class: (very tentatively) Passive?
VG: Yeah. The subject didn't do anything, but somebody or something did something to the subject. I don't know why we call the verb “passive”; it's actually the subject that's sitting there passively letting something happen to it, but that's the way it goes. We say was thrown is a passive verb.

Another day, I use body diagramming. I call three students up to the front of the room and give them three slips of paper. Written on one is The new outfielder; on another, hit; and on another, the ball. Then I tell these three students to arrange themselves so that they make a sentence and that they must somehow interact with one another in so doing. They do fairly obvious things, the subject usually hitting the verb with enough force to bump the verb into the direct object.

Then I call three more students up, keeping the first three in place. These three get The ball and was hit and by the new outfielder. I give them the same instructions. It takes the students a few minutes but they usually end up with the subject and verb students out front and the prepositional phrase student a step or two behind them, with a hand holding on to the verb. Then, with both groups of three “acting,” I ask the class to tell me the real difference in what’s going on up there. Someone will eventually get it: that the action goes to the right in one group and to the left in the other. If I then ask them to look only at the verbs in the two sentences and find a difference, someone will eventually notice that the passive verb has two words. And if that class has by then memorized all the do, be, and have verbs, I'll ask what family the helping verb belongs to and wait until someone recognizes the be family.

If time allows, I get other sets of students up front and ask them to make up their own short sentences with active and passive verbs and rearrange themselves as necessary. We get lots of laughs—and students find out not only how to shift from one voice to the other but also how such shifts affect the meaning and flow of the sentence and how indispensable the be verb and the past participle are.

—Wanda Van GoorFrom Haussamen, Brock et al. Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers (NCTE, 2003), pp. 29-32.

That is the sort of nonsense up with I will not put

A blog I came across recently is delancyplace.com. the blog contains excerpts or quotes that the editors think interesting.

I've signed on to receive daily emails and the first one I received is pasted below - an extract about prepositions. As teachers in the local schools begin report writing and grappling with making sure their reports are grammatical correct, the excerpt seems apposite. Worth a look.

"[O]ne of the all-time great grammatical shibboleths [is] that when writing a sentence or a clause, you must not ... make a preposition the last word you put in. This notion apparently originated with the poet John Dryden, who in a 1672 work quoted Ben Jonson's line 'The bodies that these souls were frighted from' and commented 'The Preposition at the end of a sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observ'd in my own writings.' Probably, Dryden based his stand on two foundations. First, prepositions in Latin never appear at the end of a sentence, not surprising since praepositio is Latin for something that 'comes before.' Second, a principle of composition that's as valid in the twenty-first century as it was in the seventeenth holds that, whenever possible, sentences should end strongly--and prepositions, as necessary as they undeniably are, are usually more of a whimper than a bang."

Whatever its origin, the ban found favor with prescriptivists through the centuries, including Edward Gibbon; John Ruskin, who in an entire book (Seven Lamps) concluded a sentence with a preposition precisely one time; Lily Tomlin's officious Ernestine the telephone operator, who asked, 'Is this the party to whom I am speaking?'; and my mother-in-law, Marge Simeone, who is prone to saying things like 'In which car are we going?'... [B]ut [this rule] was always a bit suspect. It was blown out of the water by [Henry] Fowler, who wrote in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 'Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are 'inelegant' are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards.' Fowler then gave twenty-four examples of the 'rule' being broken by such writers as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pepys, Swift, Defoe, Burke, Kipling, and the authors of the King James Bible. ... When the preposition occurs in a phrasal verb, the transposition task can be close to impossible. To 'fix' a phrasal-verb-concluding sentence like 'I'm turning in,' you'd have to come up with something like 'Turning in I am,' which not even Yoda from Star Wars could say with a straight face. "To anyone still unconvinced, I offer two small anecdotes, in reverse order of familiarity."

1. Winston Churchill, when corrected for violating this rule, supposedly replied, 'That is the sort of nonsense up with I will not put.'"

2. A guy from South Philadelphia, on vacation in London, asks a bowler-hatted gent, 'Where's the subway at?' The Londoner replies, 'Don't you Yanks realize that it's poor English to end a sentence with a preposition?' To which the South Philly guy says, 'Okay, where's the subway at, asshole?' "

Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, Broadway Books, 2007, pp. 163-165.