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Re: An interesting start...

Yes, editorial input is good. Thanks. This is being posted without a lot of editing or re-editing by me. When I have bigger chunks, I do searches for passive constructions.

"Could" is not always a good thing to use but it doesn't mark passive voice in the phrase in the story, it marks a conditional. "Saw" would leave out the information of conditionality which was important to the idea of Birdsong carefully positioning himself. There are only three uses of could in the story so far and all of them are necessary to express conditionality, in my view.

Some form of the verb "to be" is necessary for something to be in the passive voice. "The side that could be seen" would be passive but "The side he could see" is still active voice. If the actor is the subject of the sentence, it's in active voice; if the actor is the object of the sentence, it's in passive voice.

posted by Halfelven on March 31, 2008 at 4:18 PM | link to this | reply

An interesting start...

Are you looking for editorial feedback here? If not, ignore the next...

My suggestion is to be wary of passive voice... saying not "he could see" but "he saw" sorta thing. Unless passive voice serves a real purpose in the writing, it makes mushy places, if you know what I mean. It softens impact, misses the mark by just a little. It adds unnecessary words.

Now I have to go read the next entry...

posted by Ciel on March 31, 2008 at 12:27 PM | link to this | reply

As ALWAYS, I love your writing ...

I have actually read you before on another blog site - one of your stories made me laugh out loud several times :) I will not mention the name should you want to re-post here, and I hope you do. Thank you for stopping by my blog - it was an honor to have you read.