This formulation drives me mad, and I see it all the time in student papers.
It was the parents’ generation that was forgotten.
Why not just say:
The parents’ generation was forgotten.
WTF? Anybody know where this comes from?
21 September 2007
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Prone to Laughter
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21 September 2007 at 12:04 pm
Not sure where it comes from, but German includes many similar formulations not seen by most writers as wordy (as they would be in English). So there may be some kind of Germanic influence at work.
21 September 2007 at 2:55 pm
So much more charitable than any explanation I came up with! 🙂
21 September 2007 at 3:23 pm
My personal pet peeve is the wordy conditional as a means of moving to the future in a narrative:
“Within a year, Louis XVI would be dead along with his wife and children.”
22 September 2007 at 4:02 am
You know, I’m not quite as bad as your example above, but oblique phrases are a weakness of mine, too. My graduate professors tried like hell to beat it out of me, but with only about 80% success. I don’t know why I do it. I suspect that it’s out of desparation to vary my phrasing when working on a long piece.
22 September 2007 at 8:51 pm
My personal pet peeve is fiction and songs that uses “I wish I was” instead of “I wish I were.” Totally unreasonable, I know. But SB, your example doesn’t seem so problematic to me.
NPhD—There’s nothing wrong with writing something like my example—but fixing it should be as natural as correcting a misspelling.
24 September 2007 at 4:02 pm
I think students simply think roundabout, wordy constructions sound more “formal,” and passive voice comes with extra bonus formality points. In other words, they’re trying to mimic the language that they associate with academic discourse without really understanding its rules. (And to give them credit, a fair number of professors ALSO seem to think such constructions will lend their writing extra gravitas!)
25 September 2007 at 12:06 am
Yeah, I blame a lot of errors on that.