Passive Voice

“… held in captivity for three months, the Taliban execute …”

Commas, Passive Voice

I saw this on a website.

Problem:
The Taliban were not held in captivity for three months.

Explanation:
The full sentence was “After being held in captivity for three months, the Taliban execute a local official when their demands are not met.”

The sentence appeared at a website that tracks Islamic terror attacks.

This sentence documented an attack — by the Taliban, not ON the Taliban — that was purported to have occurred in Kunar, Afghanistan, on 22 November 2008.

The problem with the sentence is that “the Taliban” immediately follows the comma-terminated “After being held in captivity for three months” and therefore implies to the reader that the Taliban were held in captivity for three months.

I usually appreciate the use of active voice instead of passive voice, but this sentence calls for passive voice after the comma.

In other words, the correct way to leave the “After” clause in place is to say immediately after the comma WHO was executed.

Solution:
“… held in captivity for three months, a local official was executed …”

“… when one of the levees breached.”

Common English Blunders, Passive Voice, Verbs

I heard this on Fox News Channel yesterday.

Problem:
The verb “breach” requires an object.

Explanation:
The word “breach” — spelled with an E and an A — is both a noun and a verb.

Its meaning as a verb is to make an opening in.

In other words, the verb “breach” is a transitive verb — a verb that takes a direct object.

Examples of transitive verbs include “open” and “hit”.

The expression that I heard on television yesterday used “breached” as if it were an intransitive verb — a verb that does not require or cannot take a direct object.

Examples of intransitive verbs include “sleep” and “rain”.

“Breach” is a transitive verb. “The water breached the levee.” is a grammatically correct example.

I believe that the grammatically incorrect expression “… when one of the levees breached” comes from speakers who hear the grammatically correct, passive-voice expression “… when one of the levees was breached” but do not notice the “was” in such a passive-voice expression.

As a result, these speakers — and writers — drop the “was” and get an active-voice but grammatically incorrect expression.

Solution:
“… when one of the levees was breached.”

“The following tests will be ran.”

Passive Voice, Tenses, Verbs

I saw this in a technical presentation. (Ouch!)

Problem:
The wrong verb form is used in this sentence.

Explanation:
The Purdue University Online Writing Lab has an examples page about verb tenses and voices. A thorough discussion of English verbs appears at Wikipedia.

The sentence that I saw in the presentation was meant to be in the simple future tense and in passive voice.

We can confirm that the correct verb form is “run” — not “ran” — for this sentence by consulting Wikipedia’s set of conjugation tables for the English language’s model regular verbs and for some of its most common irregular verbs.

Another handy tool for several thousand English verbs is the verb-conjugations tool that is located here. The “Scientific Psychic” (SP) website where this tool is located is a bit quirky, but the tool seems to work well. You might like the Verbix tool instead; although it’s much pickier than the SP tool about input, its output is more thorough than SP’s output.

Here is an unorthodox but still fairly reliable method to determine which of “will be ran” or “will be run” is the correct form: search Google separately for each of “will be ran” and “will be run” with the quotation marks included in each search; the one with the dominant number of hits or matches is very likely the correct form (unless the language has fallen apart on the Web!).

For example, I just searched Google for “will be ran” and got about 31,400 matches; I searched for “will be run” and got about 568,000 matches. The 18:1 dominance of “will be run” over “will be ran” is a very good indicator that “will be run” is the correct form.

Unfortunately, this method also can depress you. Finding 31,400 matches for “will be ran” is depressing, especially when the top matches are from governmental entitities such as the State of Michigan, the University of Idaho, a high school in Iowa, a school district in North Carolina, and a commission of fire protection in Kentucky. That’s the price that you pay for an unorthodox method, I suppose.

If seeing Google return 31,400 matches for “will be ran” raises your fear for the future of our country’s literacy, then I recommend that you consider making a donation to First Book, about which I have written an article.

Solution:
“The following tests will be run.”