No wise man [or woman] will wish to bring more
long words into the world.
G. K. Chesterton^10Managing verb forms and tenses well can have important
consequences for your text. Using active verb forms with real
subjects will make your text much more lively, and fits closely
with the subject/verb/object focus above. You should strictly
avoid passive verb forms because they tend to create avoidable
ambiguities. If you are using Microsoft Word the spellchecker
facility will automatically highlight all the passive sentences in
your text, and offer a more active way of saying the same thing:
make sure that you do not just click ‘Ignore’ at these points. If
your doctorate is in history or any of the social sciences, you can
save yourself a lot of time by writing chiefly in the past tense. If
you write any passages in the present tense about real-world
events or situations, then developments after you write are likely
to render what you say anachronistic or inaccurate within the
span of your research period. During the time that your thesis
sits on library shelves in unpublished or published forms this
danger obviously grows. If you write: ‘In autumn 2001 American
public opinion supported military intervention in Afghanistan’,
your proposition will not go out of date. Whereas if you write:
‘The British public supports limited military intervention in
Iraq’ (which was true in early 2002), the statement is falsified
when a majority of people no longer endorse this strategy. Never
use the pluperfect tense, and avoid the future conditional form
beloved of biographers: ‘In a small cottage a new baby cried,
who would in less than two decades become a force in world
history.’ In other humanities disciplines, such as literature or
cultural studies, these rules may not apply universally. But it
may still pay to be cautious about writing in the present tense.
Intellectuals are prone to some particular style lapses, which
can sometimes spill over into quite serious flaws in reasoning.
People who use greater than normal levels of theorization and
abstraction can sometimes commit two classic errors. ‘Reification’
means that you convert an abstraction into a ‘thing’, to which
you then ascribe agency, the power to act, as in: ‘Society can
exact a price for non-conformity.’ It is a short step from there to
‘anthropomorphism’, where you ascribe human capacities or
attributes to non-human entities, as in: ‘A learning organization
118 ◆AUTHORING A PHD