'ing' words

I particularly dislike it when authors abuse/overuse these at the start of a sentence in an attempt to change their word orders. Often it results in lines that are grammatically incorrect, like "Walking down the stairs, he opened the front door." or simple bad-sounding (especially when overused): "Looking around, Jake saw that he was surrounded by zombies." Neither of these is passive, though.

cara said:

I've heard it's not great to use these because it makes the writing seem passive. When would it be okay to use them and how would you be able to keep the writing active?
Thanks!

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They're not passive.

They are used either as particples or in the progressive tense.

The progressive tense shows a continuous, ongoing action, rather than an action that has a distinct beginning and end.

He sat at the bar and drank a beer.

That is an action (two actions, actually) begun and completed within that sentence.

But if you say--

When I walked in, he was sitting at the bar drinking a beer.

--then it's clear that he's in the midst of a continuing action, which the POV character did not see the beginning of.

So there are specific uses for the progressive tense. The trick is not to use it when you don't need it.

Then there are participle phrases. These are used in dependent clauses to support the action in the main clause.

She attacked the porch with a broom, sweeping dust and worries into the cracks.

The main action is what she's doing with the broom. The dependent clause that starts with "sweeping" describes how she's doing it. Another important thing to note is that the action in the two parts of the sentence occur simultaneously.

However, sometimes writers come up with clunkers like this (and I've occasionally seen this even in published books):

Dashing up the walk, she rang the doorbell.

Grammatically, what this is doing is taking two equally important, sequential actions and making one a modifier of the other, implying that both happened at the same time, which is physically impossible.* The sentence should be written--

She dashed up the walk and rang the doorbell.

Learning writers seem to be very fond of putting participle phrases at the front of a sentence, to the point where you'll sometimes see four or five in a row. But it can lead to nonsensical sentences, and in general, it's a weaker structure, to be used sparingly. This, for instance, is fine--

Her heart beating wildly, she opened the box.

--but you wouldn't want to use that structure repeatedly. It could also be reversed: She opened the box, her heart beating wildly -- and still make sense, but you might not want to write it that way, since the most important and tense part of the sentence is the opening of the box, which means it probably should be last.

(*There are some (possibly self-appointed) grammarians who insist this is not so and that it's perfectly fine to write sentences like that. I happen to think they're an abomination (the sentences, not the grammarians). It makes no sense to me to use a subordinate clause as if it were an independent clause.)

As part of revisions, I scan for "was" and "were" to see where I can eliminate unnecessary gerunds. I like to get that tighter/immediate read wherever possible.

You may think I'm being pedantic here, but describing a problem accurately makes it easier to fix.

'Active' and 'passive' have a specific grammatical meaning. The distinction is about whether the grammatical subject is performing the action.

Mike punched Greg (active - mike is subject and actor (performing the action))

Greg was punched by Mike (passive - Greg is the subject, but Mike is performing the action)

Adding 'ing' -

continous tense - shows ongoing action (both the active & the passive voice can be used with 'ing')
Mike is punching Greg (active continuous)
Greg is being punched by Mike (passive continuous)

as an adjective -
an old flying machine (old and flying are both adjectives)

as a noun -
Smoking is a nasty habit.
Hunting is prohibited here.

Last, there is the venerable construction, the participle phrase, as nicely explained above. Better to avoid it.

So, just wondering what you might mean by 'active and passive'. 'ing' is completely separate from active and passive.

Whoever told you that ing words should be avoided because they sound passive doesn't know what they are talking about. Those before me gave great advice.

One thing I look for in my own manuscripts is when I use past continuous tense absent of any reason to use it.

Dan was running down the street.

can be revised to

Dan ran down the street.

However,

Dan was running down the street when the explosion threw him into the air.

is the proper use of past continuous.

So it's good to look at instances of -ing to see if there are some places where you can tighten. But don't get trapped into creating grammatically incorrect sentences by eliminating all your -ings.

I cringe whenever I see things like "Dashing up the walk, she rang the doorbell." I sometimes try to start sentences with "ing" verbs to vary my sentence structure, but I'm very careful to make sure I use two actions that actually can take place simultaneously.

My 16-year-old budding author is working on a short story she hopes to submit to one of my YA publishers, which has a line of stories for kids, by kids. I was helping her revise what she's written already and found this: "Staring up at the ceiling, I switched on my light and got out of bed."

I gave her a quick lesson on simultaneous actions...

Linguists usually call it the continuous or progressive aspect, not tense. Strictly speaking there are only two tenses: present and past.

Past tense, simple (no) aspect: He ate an apple.
Past tense, progressive aspect: He was eating apples.
Past tense, perfect aspect: He had eaten apples.
Past tense, perfect progressive aspect: He had been eating apples.

Present tense, simple (no) aspect: He eats apples.
Present tense, progressive aspect: He is eating apples.
Present tense, perfect aspect: He has eaten apples.
Present tense, perfect progressive aspect: He has been eating apples.

I don't know why you'd want to avoid any of these in writing. Neither construction is synonymous with the other at all.

Other '-ing' words, which are completely separate from this, are gerunds. These are verbs which have been turned into nouns, e.g. 'Swimming is good for you'.

All of the above examples are in the active voice. The passive voice is where the subject of the sentence isn't the agent of the sentence, usually formed using be + past tense verb, e.g.

Passive: The bank was robbed [by the agent].
Active: The subject robbed the bank.

Generally speaking the advice is to create immediacy, omit needless words, and all that malarky. But not to the extent of avoiding valuable grammatical constructions, even if they are in the passive voice or in the progressive aspect, or whatever. In short: if it sounds good, do it.

Keep in mind that saying somebody 'was ...ing' can be vague.

It can lack clarity by giving no measure of degree or timespan beyond the general act of whatever the '...ing' is.

Sometimes I think when a reader says this makes it passive it is because they see something and they know it isn't exactly right so they tag that passive voice thing on there because to them it sounds good.

All good advice above.

cara said:

Oh! I understand now, thank you very much! I may have been confused about the passive/active thing too, so it may be my fault.
Thank you for clearing this up, it was very helpful!

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Right on!
I've written tens of thousands of sentences and STILL have occasional problems using these things!

[Or should that be - After tens of thousands of sentences, occasional problems problems using "ing" words continue to arise. - ?]

ing words also start to grate to the ear, if you read your prose out loud. Even if used correctly, too many ing words in a paragraph starts to sound wrong: I heard the phone ringing, so I ran up the stairs. Answering, I realized it was Sally. She started talking about... etc. Read that out loud and you'll soon hear the phone ringing, too.

Like all fussy "rules," I just use moderation. I'm not gonna ax all my "to be" verbs and I'm not gonna ax all my "ing" deals.

Too much? Yeah, not good.

But, I don't obsess over it.

It's all about sentence structure and variety. Using past tense simple or present tense can lead to choppy sentences.

He ran up the stairs. A door flew open. A dog ran down the stairs and bit his leg. He cursed at the dog and kicked it.

Simple tense works best with action segments. Otherwise, you end up with sentences that are terse all the times.

It's about finding balance between the various aspects when writing whatever it is you write.

tmesis said:

Linguists usually call it the continuous or progressive aspect, not tense.

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QFT

Tense tells you when something happened; aspect tells you whether that action was completed or not.

tmesis said:

Linguists usually call it the continuous or progressive aspect, not tense.

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That's useful to know.

tmesis said:

Linguists usually call it the continuous or progressive aspect, not tense. Strictly speaking there are only two tenses: present and past.

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Strictly speaking, I don't think so.

This site offers a fairly clear explanation of tenses and aspects. Verb tenses can be categorized according to time or aspect. Within each, there are present, past, and future tenses, each with its simple, perfect, and progressive forms.

Aspect is divided into three parts: indefinite, complete, and continuing, which is also called progressive. The three progressive tenses (past, present, and future) are considered to be in the continuing/ incomplete/progressive aspect.

Aspect does not replace tense. It only describes it.

Fallen said:

Tense tells you when something happened; aspect tells you whether that action was completed or not.

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Indeed. Except when it comes to future time, which is where things get complicated. I won't go into it here but if anyone's wondering what happened to the future tense there's a lovely post here on Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.html

BethS said:

Strictly speaking, I don't think so.

This site offers a fairly clear explanation of tenses and aspects. Verb tenses can be categorized according to time or aspect. Within each, there are present, past, and future tenses, each with its simple, perfect, and progressive forms.

Aspect is divided into three parts: indefinite, complete, and continuing, which is also called progressive. The three progressive tenses (past, present, and future) are considered to be in the continuing/ incomplete/progressive aspect.

Aspect does not replace tense. It only describes it.

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We're both saying the same thing. The only difference is that I am using a more limited definition of 'tense', i.e. the verb is inflected. In this sense, there are only two tenses: past and present.

Passive, no. Distancing, maybe? A lack of immediacy? A sort of feeling as if the reader is in a car, watching through the window as the world passes by, doing its own thing. La, la, la, la.

And you don't always see it when you're doing it. You start with "She was jogging down the street, when she saw a dog carrying a bone," and you're off in a whole world of ing, where cars are zooming past, the sun is rising, a baby is crying, on and on...

It's easy to fix ("She was jogging down the street when a large dog darted out from an alley, with a bone in its teeth. Tibia, Sharon thought automatically.)

Love this thread. It is very helpful, especially to a noob like me who loves to write but lacks the building blocks at times.

With an overuse of progressives or participles, a writer can be guilty of passive writing--taking all the immediacy and urgency out of a scene by overburdening the narrative with complicated sentence structures.

I think, though, that there's a very helpful article on AW at http://absolutewrite.com/novels/passive_writing.htm about passive writing and verbs that you might find helpful. You might want to also check out http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/PUBS/PassiveActive.pdf for some outstanding examples that make these distinctions between active and passive writing even clearer.

tmesis said:

Indeed. Except when it comes to future time, which is where things get complicated. I won't go into it here but if anyone's wondering what happened to the future tense there's a lovely post here on Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.html

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I was a bit puzzled at first until I noticed it was only talking about English. I was expecting something more philosophical.