-4 Brushstrokes: painting with participles,
absolutes, appositives,
adjectives out of order
- transitive verb in passive voice, T.V. in active
voice
This week, in 326, was a little more difficult than it has
been. We had to find transitive verbs in the passive and active voice written
in articles or journals. The active voice was found
more frequently. However, students struggled with the passive voice. Remembering that voice only applies to S-V-O transitive
verbs, students often called Barbara over to check a sentence and were
disappointed when it was incorrect.
“Oh! I think I found a passive voice! (Leans toward peer at
the same table) Is this one?”
The other student’s eyebrows shoot up across their forehead,
eyes wide, shoulders shift up and down, “I don’t know.”
First student calls over the professor and asks about her
passive voice.
“No that’s not correct because…”
The student slumps in her seat, with a defeated look, ready
to give up.
The form of a be-verb plus a past participle creates a
passive voice. It seems pretty simple, but when applying it to writing, and
trying to point it out in others’ writing, it is challenging. For the most
part, the students finally caught the hang of it, but did not leave with
absolutely solid confidence. Sentence highlighted,
question marks written, shoulders shrugged, the students’ minds were
semi-confused. The brushstrokes became a piece of pie though. Spotting those in
someone’s writing was a lot simpler. Perhaps the fact that it was Thursday of a
long week attributed to the struggle with passive voice. But I believe it
cannot be blamed on that fact fully. The concept was just difficult for most of
the students. Writing sentences with a passive voice and active voice are
easier than finding them though.
The car was driven.
John drove the car.
When the sentences are longer, and meshed into a longer
piece of writing, it is more complicated to instantly point out the two
different voices.
It will be a challenge to teach all these different sentence
styles and tools to future students, without scaring them away from writing.
Obviously we wouldn’t teach them all of these at once, and they wouldn’t be the
main point like they are in this course, because it is meant for us to learn
all of them in order to help us incorporate them into our teaching of English
and writing. Our students, a young group of beginning
writers, would be overwhelmed if we shoved all of this information at
them. They would sit in their seats, confused and hopeless,
and probably hate school, especially English class.
I love your blog, and I agree that these concepts are probably going to be pretty difficult to teach our students. It looks to me like you did all the brushstrokes perfectly. My confusion is when you give the example of "The car was driven"(as active voice) and "John drove the car"(as passive voice). I may be wrong, but it seems like you switched these two around. I would think "The car was driven" would be passive voice because there is not an agent (whose driving the car?). I am still learning like you, so I may be incorrect, but those were my thoughts!! Great blog all together!
ReplyDeleteI agree that teaching these subjects will be difficult in the future when we ourselves are having our own issues, and we're English majors. I will say I have not covered passive and active voice much in my school career so hopefully as teachers we can introduce this topic to our students earlier on. I am an English major and enjoy writing and this is the first time I have spent and extensive amount of time on this subject. I do think however that it is an important subject and I hope I can accurately convey the message to my future students and introduce them to the subject earlier on. In grade school a majority of my English classes were, well they were crap. Many of the things we are working on in class are newer to me so I hope that I can introduce my students to many different grammar rules and techniques which will certainly help them with their writing as they move on to college.
ReplyDeleteOops! I accidentally highlighted them wrong! Sorry about that! I meant the first one to be passive, then active (for the car sentences). Thanks for pointing that out Brittanie.
ReplyDeletefabulous blog, Chelsea. Actually, the brush strokes themselves are very teachable, according to everyone I know who has tried to do them with their students. (Okay--that's not a lot of people...). As for voice: you won't really have to teach the concept of voice; I'm going to show you guys another way to talk about this issue this week.
ReplyDeleteStay tuned!