In the mid-19th century, a group of German engineers, fleeing the Great Turnip Famine of 1852-54 in Upper Silesia, arrived in America, here to disperse to the great academic centers. They were brilliant engineers. English, however, was not by them very well spoken. In their technical writings, for example, they showed a decided affinity for the passive voice. But the substance of their published materials was such that it afforded a certain acceptance of, even preference for, their awkward syntax.
The passive voice, of course, is that locution in which the subject is inert -- as in "The tree was climbed by the boy." The tree didn't do anything; it just stood there. More natural in English is the active voice, a parallel linguistic universe in which the boy climbed the tree. Subject-verb-object type of thing.
Sound technical writers no longer accentuate the passive voice. But writers striving to sound technical -- Wall Street analysts come readily to mind -- often lunge for it, seeking, perhaps, to narrow the perceived gap between the work of security analysts and that of quantum physicists. An earnestly drafted analyst submission might read: "Following consultation with outside auditors, it was decided by the board to approve the accrual in the current period of those projected future revenues reasonably determined to be attributable to current marketing expenditure." Truly turgid, and therefore putatively substantive. Conscientious use of the passive voice at the point of action. Numbing, but not yet soporific.
Of course, the hapless editor thus accosted may prefer simply to say, "The board decided to treat marketing expense as revenue," but that would be so transparent and accessible as to seem lacking in substance.
In fairness, Wall Street offers some excellent writers: terse, lucid, often witty -- and even, sometimes, on the money. But the vast subset of would-be technical writers (a community by no means confined to the securities industry) not only seems to confuse gratuitous elaboration with substance but continues to flog the passive voice. Eschew the "by" formation. Don't have any trees being climbed by boys. Or, for that matter, decisions being made by boards. Boys climb trees; boards make decisions. (And don't bother to research the Great Turnip Famine. Never happened.)
Caveat scriptor
There may be safety in numbers, but peril lurks in number. If recollection serves, a verb must agree with its subject in number -- that is, is there one of those noun things or more than one? To make this happen, the writer must know if his subject is singular or plural. Not all writers do. One reason may well be that technical writers often find themselves writing not only in a foreign language but in a dead one at that.
For purposes of example, let's try this unfortunate sentence: "The majority of our analyses apply a strict criteria that assesses the adequacy of reported corporate financial data and its investment substance."
Three numerical malfunctions, none of them uncommon. "Majority," of course, is a singular noun, requiring the verb form "applies," no matter how many analyses that majority comprises. Plain English.
We then wander into the realm of classical languages, their genders and their forms, both singular and plural. Latin has given us some half of our vocabulary, including a number of words from the feminine first declension, in which the nominative (subject) singular ends in -a and the plural in -ae -- for example, alumna and alumnae.
As a result, the -a sounds singularly ladylike to us, and this can cause confusion when it is something quite different -- like the neuter plural. In Latin, the neuter nominative singular is -um and the plural -a; less familiar, the Greek equivalents are -on and -a -- thus, one medium and two media, one phenomenon and two phenomena.
Now we're in trouble. Our sentence should properly read: "The majority of our analyses applies a strict criterion that assesses the adequacy of reported corporate financial data and their investment substance." (Yes, cautious reader, one datum, two data.)
Trust your ear. Confronted with this result, however correct, we may just want to start over -- perhaps with "Most of our analyses apply a strict standard that assesses the adequacy and the investment substance of reported corporate financial data." Much simpler, and neither wrong nor stiltedly correct.
Caveat scriptor: A word may sound weighty, but if you don't know how many it is, think of another word.
Forte knox
A closing departure from this critique of the lugubrious language of Wall Street and its battle with ancient tongues to report an emerging crisis in modern language: Following the expulsion of French au pairs from the US during the contretemps between our nations over Iraq, the French Language Police moved hastily to quarantine the returning young women lest they be carriers of contagious Americanisms. In interviews, the FLP was horrified to discover that its charges now referred to their strong points as their "for-TAYS."
French in origin, the word forte, is, of course, properly pronounced "fort" (as in Fort Knox) in both French and English (although the French insist on gargling the "r" a bit). No acute accent graces the final letter.
Intensive interrogation revealed that all the afflicted young women had served in Bourgeois Bohemian households and that the word is apparently pronounced "for-TAY" in BoBo, akin to the Italian word for "loudly" but with the stress on the second syllable.
In tense diplomatic negotiations, the French are now demanding that we return the word forte in its original form or, as an alternative, that we take back the word weekend.
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