Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Why Is It That the English Language is Unforgiving to the Second Person?

Why Is It That the English Language is Unforgiving to the Second Person?Why is it that the English language is so unforgiving to the second person? Maybe you are a writer, and you just can't get a handle on a first person perspective. In this case, consider a paper that contains information from the perspective of your subject, but uses the pronoun 'I' for your subject, and gives the example of 'I am very busy this week, and I wish I had more time.'Many people's times are very busy these days. Maybe you're in a leadership position, and you have to write at breakneck speed, making only the smallest number of mistakes. If you use the two-person pronoun 'I' to describe your subject, you may run into trouble. One way or another, your work will suffer.For writer's frustration, they have several options. One is to be extremely cautious in the selection of pronouns. Another is to give up writing altogether. The third is to go the route of that second person pronoun and describe yourself in the second person, just as we've been doing since the earliest writing of the English language.We've been taking the trouble to describe ourselves for thousands of years, and the big problem has always been that English didn't require it. 'I' is just the wrong verb tense. It is not the type of verb that relates to the subject, even though it does relate to the subject. In fact, English verbs are classically 'active' in the active voice.In general, use the passive voice when describing events, as in 'I did not eat much this morning.' In this passive voice, you use the past tenses of verbs like 'eat'sleep' to describe the same action, and you don't use 'I'.When writing in the present tense, you use 'you'we' to describe the same events. In this active voice, verbs that describe events by themselves, such as 'remember', 'write', and 'find', are in the past tense. These 'verbs' do not link the past tense of the 'subject' to the present tense of the 'verb' (the agent) of the action. 'Writ e', for example, is in the present tense, because it was completed.Writing in the past tense, while not mandatory, tends to be simpler and makes your grammar much simpler. Yet, you must remember that your reader will read and evaluate the document based on its structure, not its grammar. So, don't overlook the plain English of our language, and stick with the normal verbs.

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