A page by Mark Nichol on a site called Daily Writing Tips offers a lesson in expunging expletives from your writing.
Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
A page by Mark Nichol on a site called Daily Writing Tips offers a lesson in expunging expletives from your writing.
Expletives are syntactic fillers, devoid of explicit cognitive import; swearwords, for example. But Nichol doesn’t mean those. Grammarians also apply the term ‘expletive’ to items like the semantically inert there of There’s a hole in my bucket, and the dummy it of It’s surprising nobody objected.
Nichol gives three examples where “an expletive (a form of ‘there is’ or ‘it is’) inhibits an active, concise sentence construction, and other wording is passive and/or more verbose than necessary.” Here are his examples:
| [1] | There have been several immediate actions that the agency has taken. |
| [2] | For each initiative, there will be a number of processes that need to change, as well as new processes that may need to be created. |
| [3] | While each bankruptcy case is unique, there are standard requirements that must be met by all creditors. |
And here are his recommended replacements:
| [1′] | The agency has taken several immediate actions. |
| [2′] | For each initiative, a number of processes must change and new processes need to be created. |
| [3′] | While each bankruptcy case is unique, all creditors must meet standard requirements. |
His use of the word “passive” has nothing to do with passive clauses in the grammatical sense. In fact his second example has a passive clause that his revision does not eliminate (new processes need to be created). The terminological confusion is endemic in the usage-advice industry.
What Nichol’s examples have in common is that they contain what grammarians call existential clauses.
I’m not commending [1]–[3] as examples of excellent writing. They are perfectly ordinary sentences, fully correct, but not especially praiseworthy. Nor am I saying that Nichol’s shortenings (reducing 53 words to 35) are bad — though the second is inaccurate, carelessly altering the truth conditions of [2] (saying new processes “may need to be created” is not the same as saying they “need to be created”).
I am concerned here solely with the question of why he or anyone should claim that instances of there is should be “expunged” from your writing. Nichol seems to take it as incontrovertible that their presence is an indicator of weak writing. (And it’s not just him; study the section headed “Use the active voice” in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and you’ll see where Nichol probably got both his confused use of “passive” and his antipathy to existentials.)
One way to get some perspective is to take a look at a respected work of literature. I picked one at random from the little collection of classics
that I keep on my laptop: Oscar Wilde’s highly literary novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Searching it reveals at least 230 existential clauses in its 79,000 words.
Is Oscar Wilde’s writing not good enough? Does he need dailywritingtips.com to work over his drafts and improve his literary skills? (Don’t answer that. There is such a thing as a rhetorical question.)
Let me make two observations about existential clauses. First, in some cases there is no alternative. Although some existentials can be rephrased by shifting the noun phrase immediately following the verb to replace there in the subject position (There are three police officers waiting outside the door could be rephrased as Three police officers are waiting outside the door), not all of them can. Look at the first existential clause (boldfaced) in Wilde’s didactic preface:
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
You can’t paraphrase that as *For these hope is. The same is true of the second existential in the preface, a famous Wildean dictum:
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
You can’t rephrase that as *No such thing as a moral or an immoral book is. A significant percentage of Wilde’s existentials are of this irreducible sort.
Second, existentials put things in a special way that is sometimes exactly what you need. They present the content of the first contentful noun phrase as new information. That’s why Egg-laying mammals are in Australia sounds distinctly odd (as if the writer assumed you already knew about monotremes but not their location), whereas There are egg-laying mammals in Australia sounds normal (it presents the existence of these odd creatures as new information). So [3′] is not quite equivalent to [3], and not necessarily an improvement.
English grammar provides existential clauses for you to use, with specific discourse properties and meanings. I do not see why usage advisers so often recommend avoiding them as if they were toxic, and I wish I could convince them not to.
