> …Be-verb Fallacy, a cultish linguistic theory and the bane of many a first-year composition student's life, alleging that an extraordinary degree of "clarity," "sanity," or textual "liveliness" can be reached by strictly eliminating all passive verb forms and all forms of the verb "to be" from English-language writing. This odd but unproven contention, dating back to Alfred Korzybski's "General Semantics" self-improvement movement of the 1920's and '30's via S. I. Hayakawa, blithely ignores the fact that although numerous major world languages lack a ubiquitous "be-verb," e.g., Russian, Hindi and Arabic, speakers of these languages, like English-speaking General Semantics devotees themselves, have never been proven to enjoy any particular cognitive advantage over ordinary everyday users of the passive voice and the verb "to be." Nor have writers of the curiously stilted English that results from applying this fallacy achieved any special success in academia, professional or technical writing, or in the popular domain.
This isn’t a fallacy and I’m not sure the complaint other than this author doesn’t like it.
It’s particularly hilarious that somehow the author thinks there should be research for an author to choose a writing style. And doesn’t cite any research showing supporting their own style decisions or rationale for clarity, tone, etc.
I’m not familiar with whatever field would study success based on writing style, but E-Prime [0] has arguments for its use and someone choosing to follow it shouldn’t be criticized for choosing this method.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
This isn’t a fallacy and I’m not sure the complaint other than this author doesn’t like it.
It’s particularly hilarious that somehow the author thinks there should be research for an author to choose a writing style. And doesn’t cite any research showing supporting their own style decisions or rationale for clarity, tone, etc.
I’m not familiar with whatever field would study success based on writing style, but E-Prime [0] has arguments for its use and someone choosing to follow it shouldn’t be criticized for choosing this method.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime