I'm sure that's right, Becca, that the passive can be distancing because the subject of the sentence isn't actually doing anything.

Dav, Dee's example isn't a split infinitive, by the way, it is as Luisa says a verb-plus-phrasal particle (or plus-preposition, in the old terminology), which you're allowed to split as each of the two words is a word on its own. 'I rang up George,' is the same as 'I rang George up'. It can matter how you do it, though: 'I turned him on' means something different from 'I turned on him'.

'To go' is an infinitive form and has to have both parts to be an infinitive, so 'to boldly go' is a split infinitive, with something between the two bits. I actually think it's about as minor a mistake as it gets, since it doesn't often make a sentence confusing, which is the real crime. It just seems to be the one pedants have latched on to.

Emma

'Boldly to go' just doesn't do it for me!

No, but to go boldly's all right, I think.

Emma

Becca - that sounds like very wise words. I think it sums up why we shouldn't write in the passive voice, no matter if its okay or not.

Thanks Emma, you've been most helpful I wasn't saying Luisa was wrong by the way, it's just I thought that's what splitting infintives was. I mean particles flying around eveywhere, exploding into verbs and splitting infinitives...its more volatile than the matter of the universe, and more complicated than quantum physics!

Anyway, this is all really helpful so thanks to everyone. If nothing else, I'm now paranoid that everything I write is wrong (oh I don't even want to know if that's a sentence or not!) so it is making me very vigilant and hopefully my writing will improve as a result.

Don't worry, I'll mention you all...(to the publisher who lives in my dreams)

Thanks everyone


Dav

Collins Pocket English Grammar is a small and quite handy book for all this stuff, I find.

Cath

It just seems to be the one pedants have latched on to.

This is absolutely true. The 'no split infinitives' rule is imposed on English, but doesn't reflect the language's actual grammar. I'm using 'grammar' to mean the way that language is used by its native speakers.

This is why, as writers, we shouldn't believe grammar checkers. We need to think about the way languague sounds to us, and the way it's used by our characters. I think you've all already made this point better than I have!

Luisa

<Added>

P.S. We also need to use spellcheckers so that we don't write 'languague' and embarrass ourselves.

Also, I agree that David Crystal is very good on this subject, and most EFL reference books are good. (I'm not just saying that because I've worked on them. But, you know, if you wanted to check the credits on certain texts and look for my name... ;) )

It was drilled into me at university, by my German professor, to NEVER EVER in English send a preposition to the end of a sentence:

eg He wasn't sure from where she got her sensitivity

instead of

He wasn't sure where she got her sensitivity from

even though the last one sounds better to me.

Are you guys saying we can be less obsessed about this? I try to keep my prose as grammatical as possible, and only really bend rules with dialogue.

Sammy

<Added>

I do actually pay attention to green lines - i may eventually ignore the advice, but on the whole they make me think about and question my grammar.

The spell-checkers, though, are ridiculous, determined to rationlize every word you enter. One of my current characters loves BabyCham and oh the times I've been red-lined to alter it to Baby Ham!

Hi Sammy,
And when you read out the two versions of that sentence with 'from' in a different place the emphasis falls differently, in the first sentence: 'He wasn't sure from where she got her sensitivity' the emphasis is on 'where', or it could be on 'got' at a pinch. But in the second, 'He wasn't sure where she got her sensitivity from', the emphasis is on 'from'. So all would depend on how the writer wanted it to be read. This is interesting to me because I am soaked in Victorian style writing at the moment and there are a lot of small differences.
Becca.

Becca's right - it's worth knowing the rule, if only to break it creatively rather than ignorantly. I was interested in reading a lot of early 19th Century prose for TMOL just how fast and lose they play with grammar and sentence structure. And lots of so-called 'English' grammar was imported from Latin grammar wholesale by scholars and teachers who thought that the only real learning was Classics, regardless of how it fits our very differently structure language. I'm interested to see just how many of the names for things I was taught have been changed to something much more logical.

Of course, if you always know what voice you're writing in - and you should, even if it's your own - then that answers all questions anyway.

Emma

I suppose as your confidence grows as a writer, you become more adventurous with breaking rules.
At this relatively early stage in my writing career, I am still stuck with the presumption that if my prose isn't grammatical, a publisher won't be interested. Probably from years of studying translation, where everything, most of the time, had to be spot on.

It always amazes me, as a linguist, how little english grammar we are taught at school.

Hi Sammy,
I think the kind of publisher you would want to place your work with might question poorly structured sentences, - but not all publishers care about language so much as lucre! As we know and forever talk about on WW. - snort!
Becca.

Hi Becca
And there's me calling myself a linguist, I had to look up lucre! ( yeh, I know, look at 'lucrative', and I've studied latin!)

Yes, I feel I learnt this lesson with my first novel last year...it doesn't matter how well you write, if you don't write what people are buying...

I think it's true that good basic grammar, spelling and punctuation, is something that most publishers certainly look for; like a scruffy-looking manuscript, getting these wrong they read as a signal the writer can't be bothered to get it right. If you're going to depart from the rules, you need a good reason: the voice is the obvious one.

I think like a lot of things to do with writing, learning the rules is the (relatively) easy bit. It's getting away from them that's hard, so that the grammar happens naturally. There are grammatically correct sentences which are bad sentences, or at least inappropriate to the moment, and only way I know to develop an ear for a really good sentence is to read really good - and probably a couple of traditionally-educated generations back from our own - writing, and read it in vast quantities. Not necessarily taking notes, any more than you take notes when you're eating a really delicious and unusual meal; your instinct takes notes for you.

Emma

I think confidence in writing comes out of passion. I reckon I'm saying something akin to what Emma has just said. I'm not convinced that there are actually rules in the writing itself, although there are 'rules', or at least conventions, connected with how you present yourself to a publisher, and those should be followed to the letter. When writing is infused with the writer's personal 'ego', it is bad news. The way that ego is divorced from writing is, on the one hand to write and read endlessly, because that can drive it out of a writer, [if they are cursed with the inability to separate their own ego from their writing and not all writers are], and another way is simply the depth of your feeling and passion about the subject of your writing. So, connecting with Emma's post here, passion might lead a writer towards instinct.

'...it doesn't matter how well you write, if you don't write what people are buying...' That's one way of looking at it, but are you a writer who wants to write just what people buy, because if so, that would be as easy as turning a corner in a street. And it would be horrible, wouldn't it, if the corner you turned, took you somewhere truly boring?
Becca.

'...it doesn't matter how well you write, if you don't write what people are buying...'

I'd agree wholeheartedly with Becca. Apart from anything else, the only thing you can write better than anyone else (which is your only chance of getting published) is to write what comes from you, not what someone tells you the market wants.

I'd like to reverse that, and say

It doesn't matter what people are said to be buying, if you write the best book you're capable of writing.

Certainly agents and editors say that if something's good enough, all considerations of genre and so on go out of the window. It's when a book isn't quite that good that they start worrying about whether hard-boiled detectives are selling at the moment.

That said, there's a very good article here:

Must You ‘Sell Your Soul’?


which talks about just this issue. (I know I've posted the link before, but it seems so relevant)

Emma