Dreyer's English

9 annotations • Apr 2022 • data

Go a week without writing very rather really quite in fact
toss out—"just" (not in the sense of "righteous" but in the sense of "merely") and "so" (in the "extremely" sense, though as conjunctions go it's pretty disposable too).
Oh yes: "pretty." As in "pretty tedious." Or "pretty pedantic." Go ahead and kill that particular darling.
And "of course." That's right out. And "surely." And "that said." And "actually"? Feel free to go the rest of your life without another "actually."*1

I'm mindful of Gertrude Stein's characterization of Ezra Pound as "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not," and no one wants to be that guy
Chandler sent this note to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly in response to the copyediting of an article he'd written: By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split. Over and out.
In a sentence written in the passive voice, the thing that is acted upon is frontloaded, and the thing doing the acting comes at the end. In either case, we can easily agree that clowns are terrifying.
Often, in a sentence constructed in the passive voice, the actor is omitted entirely. Sometimes this is done in an attempt to call attention to a problem without laying blame ("The refrigerator door was left open") and sometimes, in weasel-like fashion, to avoid taking responsibility: "Mistakes were made,"
If you can append "by zombies" to the end of a sentence (or, yes, "by the clown"), you've indeed written a sentence in the passive voice.