A Bulletin from the Language Log Early Warning Center

Public Service Announcement for writers: Watch Out! The "avoid the passive" crew is about to get a power boost.

As Mark Liberman reports from Language Log:

What may be a perfect storm of linguistic misinformation is brewing. Anti-passive prejudice has merged with the mind-bending power of brain-talk, powered by lazy and credulous representatives of the fourth estate, and it's coming your way.

According to Glen Abel at Write for Blogs ("Get an active workout", 7/6/2007):

I worked with a crazy man long ago who counseled me to go through my stories and eliminate all passive verbs. I took the advice and it worked like crazy. [...]

Now comes scrientific [sic] evidence suggesting that people's brains respond to active verbs by sending signals to the appropriate body part.

Mark then chases the information down to (gasp!) the source(!!). Go on over and read it if you doubt the conclusion, which is, actually (but sadly not all that surprisingly, that Abel and co. are wrong.

Since the words were presented in isolation, and in their base form, the study did not in any way test whether the response to active verbs was different from the response to passive verbs, or from nouns or adjectives for that matter. All the stimuli were "action words" of ambiguous lexical category, and the only independent variable manipulated was the body-part associated with the action in question.

The whole misunderstanding started because Bower misunderstood "action words" to mean "active verbs".

We'll keep an eye on this one -- my prediction is that it will gradually become part of the standard toolkit of misinformation about writing. The process may be slower because the misinterpreted research report is three years old. But hell, recent popular misinformation about the "emerging science of gender differences" was largely based on research that never took place at all!

Reading about science in the popular press (or in meta-journalistic sources like Poynter) can be depressing, if you're laboring under the misapprehension that the goal is to understand and evaluate research, and to explain things to the public in a clear and interesting way. From this perspective, what you usually see is a process of progressive misunderstanding, distortion and exaggeration -- and you might conclude that science journalists are too lazy to read the original research reports, or too stupid to understand them, or too cynical and manipulative to care whether their stories bear any particular relationship to the truth.

But then, as Mark says,:

But this misses the point, which is not provision of information, but rather moral uplift and reinforcement of cultural norms.

So watch out!