Gould on Passives - Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

In his introduction to Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, Stephen Jay Gould writes, in the course of lamenting good prose style in scientific journals:

Moreover, and for some perverse reason that I have never understood, editors of scientific journals have adopted several conventions that stifle good prose, albeit unintentionally - particularly the unrelenting passive voice required in descriptive sections, and often used throughout. The desired goals are, presumably, modesty, brevity, and objectivity; but why don't these editors understand that the passive voice, a pretty barbarous literary mode in most cases, but especially in this unrelenting and list like form, offers no such guarantee? A person can be just as immodest thereby ("the discovery that was made will prove to be the greatest..."); moreover, the passive voice usually requires more words ("the work that was done showed...") than the far more eloquent direct statement ("I showed that...").

I don't wish to question the editors' motives here. Nor do I wish to go hunting through Gould's body of work to find the passives he almost certainly uses. (Well, okay - I did; see below.) Nor do I wish to get into knock-down argument over the uses of the passive, which are several and valuable. (Perhaps in a later post?) A quick glance at Gould's own sentences below may hint at them for you, though.

Instead, I wish to object to his stricture on the grounds that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Neither of the examples he provides are passive sentences. They both have a short passive relative clause (that was made, that was done), but the sentences are in active voice: The discovery will prove, The work showed.

It's true that "will prove to be" has that pesky "to be" in it, but that's not enough to make it a passive sentence. The passive voice is made with the AUX 'be' and the -N form of the main verb. As in his examples: to do -> PAST + be + do-N = was done; PAST + be + make-N = was made. The passive of "will prove to be" is "will be proved to be".

For that matter, "to be" has no passive, because only transitive verbs can be passive (including ditransitives when both objects are expressed). The form would be "is been" - and that's not English.

What Gould is complaining about here is a "relentless" depersonalization of the prose - the removal of the author. The difference between "The work showed" and "I showed" isn't grammatical voice; it's the presence (or absence) of the authorial voice - the I.

"The discovery which I made will prove to be" is completely in the active voice and it has exactly as many words as the version he objects to. The same goes for "The work which I did showed...” True, they're wordier than "My discovery will prove to be" or "I showed", but the much-maligned passive voice has nothing to do with that.

I do wish indeed that people who complain about the passive voice would take the trouble to discover what it actually is before they start. Maybe then they wouldn't, and would instead direct their ire towards their real target, whatever that may be. Gould's is bad, stilted prose - and the passive, as such, has nothing to do with that.

I said above I wasn't going to go hunting through his works, but then I decided perhaps I should. I just googled him and here's the first thing of his I found: 'Curveball', published in The New Yorker, November 28, 1994. Each of these sentences are either completely passive, or contain passive relative clauses, sometimes with the relativizer omitted, as English permits it to be. I've italicized those verb phrases for you.

The central fallacy in using the substantial heritability of within–group IQ (among whites, for example) as an explanation of average differences between groups (whites versus blacks, for example) is now well known and acknowledged by all, including Herrnstein and Murray, but deserves a restatement by example.

Virtually all the analysis rests on a single technique applied to a single set of data—probably done in one computer run.

Still, claims as broad as those advanced in The Bell Curve simply cannot be properly defended—that is, either supported or denied—by such a restricted approach.

The blatant errors and inadequacies of The Bell Curve could be picked up by lay reviewers if only they would not let themselves be frightened by numbers—for Herrnstein and Murray do write clearly, and their mistakes are both patent and accessible.

But this issue cannot be decided, or even understood, without discussing the key and only rationale that has maintained g since Spearman invented it: factor analysis.

Admittedly, factor analysis is a difficult mathematical subject, but it can be explained to lay readers with a geometrical formulation developed by L. L. Thurstone, an American psychologist, in the 1930s and used by me in a full chapter on factor analysis in my 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man.

The results of these tests can be plotted on a multidimensional graph with an axis for each test.

This theory (which I support) has been advocated by many prominent psychometricians, including J. P. Guilford, in the 1950s, and Howard Gardner today.

And this crucial question (to which we do not know the answer) cannot be addressed by a demonstration that S–bias doesn't exist, which is the only issue analyzed, however correctly, in The Bell Curve.

But, in violation of all statistical norms that I've ever learned, they plot only the regression curve and do not show the scatter of variation around the curve, so their graphs do not show anything about the strength of the relationships—that is, the amount of variation in social factors explained by IQ and socioeconomic status.

I am delighted that The Bell Curve was written–so that its errors could be exposed, for Herrnstein and Murray are right to point out the difference between public and private agendas on race, and we must struggle to make an impact on the private agendas as well.

Herrnstein and Murray yearn romantically for the good old days of towns and neighborhoods where all people could be given tasks of value, and self–esteem could be found for people on all steps of the IQ hierarchy...

Out of 4,314 words in this review, 432 of them - 10% - are in passive sentences. Heck, there’s an even a passive “I” clause! ("used by me", Steve? Why not "which I used"?) The conclusion? Gould was talking through his hat.