In case you missed my posting from March 16th ("Conference Attendees Sickened by Freebie Glossary, not Lunch"), here’s another outrageous sample from the infamous Official Glossary of Service Automation Terms (OGSAT), that satanic piece of literature disseminated in Speech Tek West’s conference attendee registration freebie bags…
Passive Voice
In Voice Response dialogs, …
I stopped to wonder why “Voice Response” got capital letters, but “dialogs” didn’t. Or is “Voice Response” supposed to be like “the United Nations,” while dialogs are just “generic”? But this pause for thought was like that cruel moment pre-tsunami, the withdrawal of the water beckoning naïve onlookers ever closer, who never guessed the catastrophic horror about to befall them. …But back to our official Service Automation definition, an unnatural disaster.
Passive Voice
In Voice Response dialogs, the passive voice is a means to pose an imperative without using the first person part of speech. For example: “Your account number is needed.” This is really a sideways way of saying: “I need your account number.”
“To pose an imperative”? “Without using the first person part of speech”?? “My account number is needed???” …“Sideways way”????
On the (uninspired) sandwich line at the conference, I showed this “official definition” to a few linguist colleagues. One colleague, who I’ll call “L” read the offending blurb thoughtfully, looked back up at me, and uttered something with a kind of enlightened, Zen impartiality and calm that makes these kinds of observations especially brilliant. She said something like:
“The thing is, if you do know what the passive is, this is just wrong; and if you don’t know what the passive is, this can only make matters worse.”
Indeed, this was the definitive summation. She looked at me compassionately, understanding my anguish. For I (and L, too, I suspect) treasure the passive in the way that nephrologists treasure renal osmosis. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. One of God’s (and evolution’s) many miracles. The flotation-enabling chambered nautilus shell of syntax. A window into the workings of the human mind. Snowflakes.
I had shown the glossary to another linguist colleague, “S,” earlier in the day. Later on, I saw her wide-eyed with excitement as she was riding the up escalator while I was going down. Just as we were about to cross, she brandished her personal copy of the OGSAT in the escalator-crossing airspace and gushed: “How did you know this would sooooo get to me??!!??” No signs of Starbucks on her, but she seemed crazed, frenzied, about to froth at the mouth. I asked something rhetorical, a perfunctory gesture just to fill my turn, but not invite a response, since we were crossing, after all: “How could it not?” I asked back…and so we proceeded on our separate vectors...
Then there was “R,” who flipped the glossary over to check out the front and back cover (an attempt to discover the identity of the perpetrator?) after not learning about the passive voice, and then pronounced a comment that I believe displayed tremendous insight, for a non-linguist but obvious Lover of Language: “Is this a joke? ...What is this a joke?” It seemed that he wasn’t aware of this glossary’s existence in his freebie bag.
Or, like my buddy “B,” maybe he knew it was there, but immediately threw it out in the practical way that lots of us do – there’s so much wasted paper in the bag that it’s nice to give it a good, thorough once-through straight-away. I usually do this back at the hotel, so I can utter clever but snide remarks aloud as I toss sample of bad marketing prose after sample of bad marketing prose into the sanitized trash can. Plus, throwing out all that useless paper lightens the load and makes room for other, better free stuff.
I personally didn’t have anything to say (…at the time). As when encountering any sort of affront to my brain, or any other body part, I was left speechless. And for good reason. The thing about these OGSAT "definitions" is that they pack multiple punches in rapid-fire succession. They're wrong once and then they're quickly wrong again, and again…and again, so you’re left not knowing which error, misconception, or bad example to address first. Phewww! Now that I’ve regained my wind, here’s my long overdue response.
Since the OGSAT author restricts his subject matter to “Voice Response dialogs,” let’s look at the typical first instance of a passive sentence in over-the-phone customer service interactions, automated or otherwise:
Recorded message, in the passive:
“This call may be recorded or monitored for quality assurance purposes.”
Now if you refer to the OGSAT “definition” of the passive, that talk about imperatives (i.e. commands) and the first-person has obviously zero relevance. In fact, the implied subject of the verb is probably not “I,” because if it were, why would the speaker use the verb “may,” a modal verb that implies uncertainty. In other words: wouldn’t someone recording or monitoring a call know whether they were doing it or not? When you tell someone “I may record or monitor this call…,” it kinda sorta comes off as weird. Well? Are you or aren’t you? Make up your mind already!
The reason why this familiar recorded message is “passive” is because the verb’s PATIENT (the verb’s “do-ee” as opposed to its “do-er”) is the grammatical SUBJECT of the sentence. It is the sentence’s topic, upon which some comment is about to be made.
Voiced in the active, the sentence would be rendered:
Active versions of the same prompt:
“Someone may record or monitor this call for quality assurance purposes.”
or
“One of our quality-assurance employees may record or monitor this call.”
As these active examples illustrate, the verb’s AGENT (or “do-er”) is the grammatical subject. That’s what makes them “active,” definitionally. From the perspective of a discourse linguist, the active frames the AGENT as the topic.
To sum up, the active’s subject is the agent, the passive’s subject is the patient. Active, agent. Passive, patient. They're each appropriate in their own way and their proper use (by "proper," I really mean "authentic", not what would make your high school grammar teacher happy, necessarily) depends on concept and context.
What is appropriate or desirable about the passive wording “This call may be monitored…” is that the passive syntax not only sets up the patient “This call” as the topic of the ensuing proposition, but also it simultaneously “unemploys” the agent (in this case, “someone” or “one of our QA employees”). We can infer from the choice of the passive that the agent has been unemployed since his or her identity is seen as irrelevant in the context of the interaction. (The “unemployment” metaphor isn’t mine – it comes from Relational Grammar, a theory of grammar brought to us by Dr. David Perlmutter, though he uses analogous terms from French.)
So when Ronald Reagan used the passive voice in saying “Mistakes were made,” realize that it would have been inconvenient for him to employ the agent, which the active voice requires. He would have had to say: “My friends who I appointed to high political offices made mistakes.”
Another message frequent in automated systems is:
"Your last payment, in the amount of [amount] was received on [date]."
Again, the passive unemploys the agent, understood to be “we,” “our billing department," or “someone who works here at ACME Gas and Electric,” which is perceived as irrelevant, from the (virtual) customer service rep’s point of view. Notice that the OGSAT’s definition is once again irrelevant – the meaning of this passive prompt can’t be paraphrased with an “I need.”
Bottom line: There are no veiled imperatives, no hidden first-persons. Not even any first people.
But the OGSAT discourages prompt-writers from using the passive on the grounds that it is a “sideways way” (pejorative!) of implying “I need.” However, the “I need” paraphrase is appropriate only occasionally and incidentally. Categorically, it does not define the passive. It’s like saying that if you’re a Spanish-speaker, you’re from Nicaragua. Yes, it’s that twisted, amigo.
The fact that the active requires the agent while the passive requires the patient provides a glimpse into the etymology (word origin) of the terms “active” and “passive,” via their relationship to the words “agent” and “patient.” “Active” and “passive” to refer to the subject’s semantic role (do-er vs. do-ee) with respect to the verb (like “monitor” or “record”), NOT to refer to personality traits like “active” in the sense of people who are “strong, dominant” (a good thing in Western society) versus “passive” in the sense of “weak, submissive” (which Western culture frowns upon).
When you ask self-proclaimed “language experts” why the passive should be avoided, they allege that the passive is “weak.” This is tantamount to thinking that tables in French are sexually feminine, while French suicide is sexually male. The word for “table’ in French is feminine grammatically, and “suicide” is masculine grammatically. Tables and suicide are as sexual or gender-ful as “This call is being monitored” betokens weakness, or any character flaw that so-called “language experts” allege.
Yes, there is something very wrong with the OGSAT example of the passive: “Your account number is needed.” It’s simply not conversational English! Who speaks like this??? Does “account numbers being needed” suggest that the writer has an ear for dialog? No! This is the great literary stuff of engineering texts, not over-the-phone interactions between a manicurist and her virtual banking representative. What ever happened to “What’s your account number?” or “Tell me your account number, like this, for instance, seven zero seven …” You don’t need to have a degree in linguistics to be repelled by the frosty corporate (not to mention bizarre) sound of “Your account number is needed.” …At least “This call may be recorded or monitored for quality assurance purposes” has the unmistakable ring of a disclaimer that came down from Legal. It rarely defines the tone or sets the style for the rest of the user experience. Besides, there are plenty of conversational alternatives to this wording that also take advantage of the passive and its ability to unemploy the agent.
Now about “the passive voice is a means to pose an imperative without using the first person part of speech”. It really pains me to have to point this out to so-called speech scientists, since they presumably have had some background in the study of human language, but here goes…Besides having nothing significant to do with the passive, the imperative mood, as in “Give me a break” (BTW, note that the passive is near nonsense: “A break was given”) implies a second person agent, not the first person. In case you missed the day they did “subject deletion” in Linguistics 101, the usual linguistic proof that the subject of an imperative is the second person is something like what you have here in (A) through (C):
(A) I gave you a break.
(B) You gave yourself a break.
(C) (imperative) Give yourself a break.
The subject of (A) is the first person (“I”) and the object is “you”. Agreed? Agreed. The subject of (B) is the second person, which is presumably what occasions the reflexive object pronoun “yourself”. Agreed? Agreed. So, brain-teaser: what is the subject of the imperative in (C), which has the same reflexive object as (B)? ...Hint: It ain’t the first person, despite what it says in your freebie bag!
...Besides which, there is no such thing as "the first person part of speech." Can someone else please can take up that battle?
Anyway, I have never been so astounded by such unbridled, cocksure negligence in a supposedly professional arena. (Or, if you insist on using the active, “Such unbridled, cocksure negligence in a supposedly professional arena has never so astounded me.”)
The passive is a lot more complicated, and functional, than most people realize when it comes to how we unconsciously structure messages as speakers and decode them as listeners. Certainly, this is far beyond the understanding of the author of this mess of an “official glossary.” To understand how the passive is a means to satisfy important cognitive principles like topic maintenance, end focus, and end weight, see Quirk and Greenbaum’s Concise Grammar of Contemporary English (1973, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
If you’re really bored at your next company meeting and you want something to do without straying from the warm and fuzzy world of Service Automation Terms, go through the Official Glossary and give yourself a quarter [imperative!] for every passive sentence you find that defies its own “official definition.” ...Here’s one: “Marquee – Any scrolling area of text is called a marquee.” It’s passive, but no hint of a hidden first-person or an imperative behind the scenes.
…Now here’s something funny -- I would’ve used the active there in order to comply with the principles of topic maintenance and end focus, like this: “Marquee – A ‘marquee’ refers to any area of scrolling text.”
Doesn't that feel better?
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