by rekless 5 Replies latest jw friends
In my book I have pasted some direct quotes from the WT literature and there are about 60% passive sentences along with wrong grammar and some spelling mistakes.
Has anyone else found the WT literature written poorly?
I just had an agent call me and tell me my work is well written and to contact her when I am finished.
Dan
just the other day I did the same thing and I noticed there a few errors as well. Not that I have any room to talk, my grammer and spelling is terrible. But I also don't have an entire staff working on my posts.
I'm really persnickety about spelling, grammar and punctuation and used to love it when I found mistakes in the publications.
I have to admit that I didn't find many spelling mistakes. There were a lot of grammar and punctuation issues though; too much use of unnecessary exclamation marks used to get on my nerves especially.
It's a good point about passive sentences Reckless. I remember from my college English class that many businesses, politicians, educators etc use the passive voice to avoid responsibility for actions taken.
A lot of grammatical errors and strange sentence structure in the mags I often put down to being an American way of forming a sentence. Maybe it was just plain wrong after all.
If you read Rutherford-era stuff, you can find things like "teached" and "choosed" from time to time....
...irregardless...
Regards,
Jim TX
We have given passives an undeserved bad rap. Many legitimate places exist for passives--usually depending on the preceding sentence--that make information flow more smoothly. The important thing is knowing the difference and knowing when to use them. 60% is excessive by anyone's standard, though.
