 Just to get started the first thing that I want to say is if you look in fact at the very first slide after my cover slide what it says there is the law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. I will grant you it is a ringing quote by a rather dubious fellow in US history but nonetheless I found it very apt for what we're doing today. As a teacher of English as a lecturer in English at this university I have a distinct fascination for the language used in the law in particular for two reasons. One I have a history of going to law school myself but in addition to that I find that the law is a particularly potent area for language because so much of what we're doing so much of the reality that's being shaped in the law is shaped by the words that are being used so I'm very happy to be here today and likewise to be participating on November 17th in this particular program. As I said on Mark Fetulo I'm a lecturer in English working out of Tilburg University Language Center so we are the folks at this university who provide basically all of the language skills support to the various schools and faculties at this institution and that includes obviously the law school. So if we look at the two parts what are we doing in these sessions today's session is supposedly as I said the more theoretical of the two I'm going to be talking about a number of different issues among other things what we in the English teaching world call lexicon building so basically looking at vocabulary terminology the word level of things I also want to talk to you about a number of kind of key grammatical issues that have to do with expression so things like the use of the future and some points also on limitations of English and issues that have to do with translation etc but key to all of this if you look at this is what we're going to be looking at is in essence also the flexibility of language the degree to which you have opportunities to actually throw stuff out there in a different language and one of the things that I know among both students and professionals alike is an issue is that a lot of people feel that the moment they leave their mother tongue that they're leaving behind whole areas of their expressive toolbox and one of the things that I try to do is to bring that back in so that we're looking and saying okay all of that power that you have in one language let's try to get some of that back in in the second language so that you can in fact function at the level of professionalism that you would desire of yourself in the first language as well okay then as I said the 17th this is a workshop we'll be discussing points of language and legal communication in the context of your practice one of the things that I'm going to request of you at the end of today's session is I have a lit a kind of grocery list of things that I'd like for you to look for and that includes for example to the degree possible because as I said I realized that in the context of your professional activities a good deal of what takes place is perhaps confidential or is not meant for public dissemination but within those limitations to look for materials that you can say well this is something typically I would have to communicate about in English say with members of the commission with other individuals within the profession other judges lawyers advocates etc or could be that you're saying I just have general issues with English that I would like to see discussed and hear examples of the type of writing and communication I face in that respect and then the other thing that I usually ask for is just in that sense the cover all of any other questions you may have that you write them down and send them to me then if I have them in advance I can more effectively deal with them even then questions from the floor however desirable indeed those questions from the floor actually are so in that respect that's what I will open we will be looking at at that point in time now what is the problem that you're facing what have I been set with well if we look at the context of the course you need to communicate with a number of different people and this is where things get really interesting because the first is you're looking you're saying fellow members of the judiciary are probably going to be uh on your list of people you will need to communicate with in English looking at it is the lingua franca of uh now extant and forming european law and certainly with respect to tax law this is going to become an issue so indeed you have to be up to date on the the terminology but also in a sense the codos and uh what you might call the habits and fashions of the of the speech within the perfection you will also have to discuss things with individuals for example the level of the european commission and of course there it could be that while in first instance you're talking to fellow lawyers fellow legal scholars it could also be that you will be dealing with individuals who are not we're policymakers coming out of different areas that can also provide challenges of its own and then finally or rather in that respect also therefore non-legal authorities at the level of uh at the european level now this is what i came up with specifically for the context of this course obviously what you see is that the more internationally uh busy you become in any profession the more you have to start communicating in english with a wide variety of people but i'm looking for the specific context of this course this was in a sense uh the list that i came up with and then i added to that in order to discuss obviously keep within the thematics the specifics of state law the interface with european legislation of policymaking uh with regard to the the desirability for the desirability for a lack of state aid in any given situation with respect to tax law and all of the wonderful variegated things that come with that so uh all of those issues that you've been discussing such as transfer pricing um warping of economic uh systems uh competition etc etc so now what do i do in cases like this what am i looking at well obviously with again i seem to be saying obviously lots of action careful about that um if you look at this we have 10 hours we have four hours today we have about six contact hours on the 17th you have independent study what i can do in that time is of course limited there's only so much that can take place so what i tend to do and if we look then at the goals for the course what you see is i look at problem possible problem areas so that's what i've done beforehand is i looked at the materials that you've been given what kind of language are they using what could be stumbling points what do i know from my experience as a teacher a translator a corrector etc etc are typically points that people stumble at and then what we try to do is we look at those areas in order to alleviate those particular problems to improve your ability to express yourself in english about in this case the law specifically the law as it pertains to state aid and tax law so that's very much as i said where we're going and where we will be going throughout this course that being said i need to issue a word of warning uh one of the things that typically comes up in courses like this and this is something that again it came up also in my discussion before i undertook this this course is that people are often talking about the ability to translate the ability to in essence mediate from one language to another and i always tell people and again if you look at the keep in mind that i have do keep in mind that if you look at this the ability to speak one language is a skill the ability to speak another language is a skill that does not include the ability to translate from the one to the other that is an entirely different skill set learning how to translate properly is basically like learning a third language all together so on the whole i will grant you i have a bit of a bias in this respect having been a former professional translator but i do tell people basically that if you're facing really bulk text or bulk uh levels of communication that need to be translated you do absolutely need to go to a professional with this because doing it yourself is simply not going to work so that's one thing the other thing then that i tell people is if you're going to be working in english on your own as i said learning to speak a second language is a skill set you can do this and that's fine but then what you have to learn to not do is to not translate you have to start really thinking compartmentalized so in that sense that you say when i'm working on something in english i'm going to be communicating in english i am not going to think of it first in dutch in german in italian i'm going to go straight to english i'm going to look within the boundaries of my own proficiency what can i say with my toolbox in english to get my point across because the danger is that if you first think of it in dutch german italian what you're going to do is start translating and that's where trouble starts so in that sense you really have to start thinking in uh that light and of course the one thing that i also add that's always as i said i have a distinct fascination with uh with the language with wall and the language is in addition to the common challenge of moving from any language into another and communicating effectively to professional level you're also in legal systems that differ so they often have even even when discussing the same term may actually be referring to different things uh in that respect one of the things that i remember from uh both law school and uh translating is that if you start looking at terms like for example in what is called a dutch i do not know in german and italian unfortunately uh but omenekumatika dot is in commonly translated in dictionaries as tort law the truth is there's very subtle differences between these things the the boundaries of what constitutes omenekumatika dot and what constitutes torts are actually different areas there's a if you had a venn diagram there'd be a huge degree of overlap i'll grant you this there are those areas where in each case it falls outside of it you have to be very careful when you're also looking at your own legal system and trying in a sense not just to translate linguistically but also just translate legally that can be an issue as well since it's for example so correct it's fiscal law is not the same as fiscal right uh to some degree that's actually true because uh if i'm correct uh what is commonly called fiscal right in the Netherlands is more limited i thought to tax law and if i'm correct fiscal law is actually a greater boundary it also has to do with accounting law yeah and so right away you're seeing those kind of differences this is exactly what i'm talking so indeed that's something that needs to be uh you need to watch for um so yeah so what i'm looking at is then if we look at the approach as i said i look at grammar structure vocabulary idiom issues right now what you saw is typically the issue of vocabulary and terminology translation uh i also look at the attitudes and more is behind choices that are made one of the things that i often tell people is not this is not just about the howl but it's about the why we do certain things that uh make sense so that's up there as well and to start i've got something for you i want to throw something out there so now dig in right away into the the meat and potatoes of uh of english as it were once you look if you look at for example this slide the following statements says discovery x from study y okay that's not a statement that's actually a non-sentence i will grant you that but it gives us a basic structure so you have something being discovered from looking at something else now we could i could just really easily solve this i can say how do i put this into a good correct sentence i can say we investigated x and discovered y but i'm going to ask you something what's going on in that sentence first of all where am i putting the emphasis who is getting a lot of attention in this sentence actually i think i switched x and y i wrote in it my apologies that i see you now okay sorry so we investigated y and discovered x i just saw that i saw you looking at it and then i realized what i was doing my apologies see it's good to have judges in there one thing i said okay but if you look at the sentence within correction added my apologies what what where's the where's the emphasis in a sentence like this who gets a lot of attention it's not equal because of the end okay we did investigated x and discovered y but what's the subject of the sentence we don't in fact if you look at this who's getting the most attention it's whoever's doing this so you say we investigated x and discovered y now we is fairly bland it's a pronoun but if you say you filled in something like the committee on x the a b and c investigated x or investigated y and discovered x what you'll quickly see is that the subject is getting a huge degree of emphasis what if you don't want it what if it's not about the people what if it's just about the thing so what if it's about the process and not the actors in that sense well then that's the thing if you look further so however what do you see we could also say for example x was investigated y was discovered hey look at that now we've worked someone out of the system so now we're saying that it's actually more about the activity that took place and the results and not so much about who did it and in that respect that creates a different dynamic so right away you're saying you're putting the emphasis somewhere else and I give you examples like this because this is typically what people identify when they say I don't have enough space in the second language because what happens is in your first language you automatically do these things you say I want the emphasis to be a little different switcher which can you switch around but in a second language you're often happy to have one or two solutions and then you kind of leave it because consider this what if I say you know what I think this sentence is a little dead it doesn't have much dynamism it's basically all in the past tense it's a parallel construction so it works it's solid but maybe I want to have more dynamism so then I would do something like this investigating x we discovered y look at that now what I'm doing is I'm taking one of the elements out of the main sentence I'm basically saying using it as what you call a modifier phrase I'm saying what the rest of this sentence is about can be placed in the context of this particular thing so investigating this this is the result that came out wow terrific I could also but maybe well now let me ask you this what about this what have I done here the same bit more weird yeah basically and there's a reason for that what reason now first of all what I've done is this is what's called nominalization nominalization so basically what I've said is I've got a whole bunch of verbals so I have a bunch of verbs to investigate to discover to react whatever kind of verb you want and I say I want to turn them into nouns I want to make those elements I want them to not be actions I want them to be things now what happens when you do that and you get the investigation of x led to the discovery of y so I have to add another verb I have to add uh for example things like prepositions so of the to this led etc etc so you get a whole bunch of you get a greater number of words a greater mass what does nominalization do in a sentence it slows you down as a reader and sometimes that can be the point and certainly in legal argumentation when you're trying to persuade someone of the essence of something that something is important not because it is necessary in activity but because it is a concept or a thing you want to slow your reader down that little bit so sometimes you do this you actually take the dynamism back out of the sentence you say it's about investigation it's about discovery those are things tactile it's concrete and it slows your reader down a little bit you want to be where you're doing this because if you slow your readers down too much they'll get bored and they'll walk away but the truth is it is sometimes a mechanism that you want to use of course it could be that what you're really trying to do is explain something so it's not just about the relationship it's not that you're looking and saying it's about the investigation and the discovery it's that you say it was only by doing this that we were able to find out a certain thing and again think about how the law works law legal argumentation works as often as not you're not just trying to point out the relationships between things you're trying to point out the essential relationships between things so that you say for example yes it's only by applying this particular set of rules that we will actually get the results that we desire if we do not do this we will not get that so it was only an investigating x that became possible to discover why and then finally what you could also do is you could make it in that sense more narrative having investigated we subsequently discovered why what am I doing here what am I first of all what I'm trying to show you in that respect is as I said flexibility we're looking at this and saying this is about flexible use of language this is about creating greater opportunity in language use but what I'm also showing you is that even within with just a number of you know legal blocks a limited number there's a huge amount of potential to say different things and that this is something that's often well this is saying by the way that's often overlooked in first language writing that I often see people using very repetitive means of communication but the other end of this is that you also look and you say yeah I have different agendas with each of these different sentences I'm trying to say something different each time even though I'm communicating the same basic piece of information so that's something that has to be kept in mind now I wouldn't be an English teacher if I didn't then backtrack and say what was I literally doing in looking at this and then if we look at it in that sense what is being done you look at that slide X was investigated and Y discovered this is basically the use of what we call a passive construction so I usually tell people first way out of things if I can just write briefly on the board is one of the big things that people struggle with is I and we so I don't think you yeah let me see if I can oh that's that's gonna be difficult yeah yeah that's gonna be really hard I think I'm just gonna say it in this respect so but basically I and we so if we look at pronouns first person what we call the first person perspective in that respect that's a problem because in many cases people are trying to eliminate that from their formal communications now again question why would you why would you want to do that why do you need to get yourself out of the picture exactly what are you supposed to be doing I mean this is your this is you know your profession among and above perhaps many others is about objectivity you're supposed to be looking at the facts you're supposed to be adjudicating not based on opinion as such not based on personal experience emotion any of those things but looking objectively at the facts giving a solid academic legal analysis coming to a conclusion that can be seen as being equitable for multiple parties or at least seen as acceptable for multiple parties not necessarily even equitable but the fact is in order to do that you have to watch your language use that it's often not about you it's about what is being said and what is being done and that's where passive constructions are great because in that sense if you look at it and from that perspective then that's how you get constructions where you say you know it's not about well I or we feel that this is the case but no it is the opinion of the courts that X must be taken into consideration and dealing with Y in order for this to be seen as befalling within the legal boundaries of said so yes you have to do these things I will point something out by the way writing guides are allergic to the passive in this day and age and there's a reason for that and the reason is is that most writing guides are not written for lawyers or indeed for people working in this type of context they're often written for well essentially individuals trying to sell things whether it's literally things so business people but also even within the academic community the the market of our ideas is often seen as a place where things are sold in that sense and we're often being asked to put these things out there on that level and there's another reason for this and the other reason is in a sense this room the more international audiences for english get the more that we're seeing oh did I just stop on something sorry about that uh the more hey that's funny just give me a second here sorry guys the more that uh more international audiences get the more you see there a need for accommodation and what do we mean by that that you need to keep your language is streamlined and is accessible as possible and one thing we can say as and your name now eludes me again what's this error sorry that's your name and what ed pointed out uh before is as soon as you start using more complex constructions and the passive is generally more complex and the active becomes longer becomes a little more difficult to access so there's a a tendency when instructing writers within this academic or international community to use active pros but what did I just say you're not there for the general world you're there with down very specific things for a very specific community so in this sense there's nothing wrong with the passive as I said passive past tense formulation writer researcher as uh no writer researcher is subject then you have investigating x we discovered why there you're using uh you do have a first person uh in this case you actually have to i'm going to come back to that later then there's something called the dangling modifier problem that we're going to discuss at a later point and that relates to this uh this uses what's called a jaren formulation so this i and g things of you know thinking about this we just we came to this working on this we found this investigating x we discovered why you have a question by a chance jaren well that was what i was just getting to what is a jaren formulation it's any of those verbs that end with i and g so like working doing finding so in that sense this case what you have is investigating x we discovered why and we call that uh and we call those uh this is in in fact a jaren modification because what are you doing you're using that i and g form of the verb and what are you using it to do you're using it to modify to determine what's going to follow so we discovered why how do we discover why by investigating x and that's often a very nice kind of clean way of dealing with these things so i find that that's one that's also nice to put out there uh then of course what else do they talk about nominalization so you have verbs you have these actions that take place so as you said to investigate to discover but sometimes you want to turn them into nouns you want to turn them into um yeah very simply things as it works so in this case i don't want to talk about discover or investigate i don't want to talk about the discovery the investigation that makes it more concrete but what did we say it also slows down your sentence excuse me yes uh for example investigating x uh why has been discovered would that be a possibility no why not that was and that was what i was just getting around to when i talked about there's something in in english and in this case i will very much try to do this just for a moment in english it's that's what we call a dangling modifier problem and what's a dangling modifier problem well give me your sentence again investigating x why has been discovered why has been discovered investigating x why has been discovered now this is a modifier phrase and what we mean by that is it's a phrase that's describing or discussing something else in the sentence however when you use a gerund like that so one of these i and g things you're referring to something within the other sentence not just the whole other sentence do you see where i'm coming from so to give you an example you could also have a sentence like this um it's a another version of modification is something like this um mark a brilliant teacher works until birth what is a brilliant teacher modifying what is it saying something about so it's saying something about the subject well the same is true of this kind of construction investigating x has to say something about the subject but what's the subject in this in this sentence why yeah but why didn't do the investigating and that's what's called a dangling modifier construction because what we've essentially done is we've created an actor we in this case that's outside of the sentence and in english you're not allowed to do that but i'm going to tell you something i have a prediction give this another 20 years and it's going to be correcting no i'm not i'm not kidding because the truth is people have been studying these types of constructions within the international community this is so accepted because it's so clear what you're saying but the rules of grammar as yet do not allow you to do that so then as soon as you use a jaren you're kind of stuck with using uh you have to have a subject that that construction that that modifier phrase actually refers to now as i said we're going to discuss this the whole dangling modifier issue a little later on i have really nice solutions for this there are ways of getting around it that you don't always have to use we or i or involve yourself in the sentence does it revert right back to first person formulation but you do have to find other solutions to that okay then if we look at the the final sentence what did we see was oh well that was actually uh no the the final two sentences then what we actually see is if you look at what is being done it was only in investigating then what you see here is again you're using now what are called verbal constructions so basically in investigating this to discover that that's typically a way to create an explanatory type of sentence so that as soon as you start thinking in those senses of in this to do that then you tend to get more of an explanatory or narrative motive and that's usually quite useful and then finally if you look at this says having investigated x we subsequently discovered why then what you're using is that's true sequencing and narrative and you're actually using in that case a and i'm going to come back to this later what's called a perfective expression in this case the present perfect uh having investigated to uh come up with the idea of something took place in the past that has a connection to the presence and therefore led that idea of the discovery was something that came later because of what went before so that's very much uh what's going on uh in those cases now what does this leave us with well this brings me back to choices and possibilities what i was talking about before first of all perspective can change first person versus third person so that's something that you that obviously needs some looking at what else can change is active versus passive what we call voice so i'm going to be talking to you about the the shifts in voice that take place momentary versus definitive tense time is something that's of the issue and syntax noun versus verb so there's choices of do i want to talk about an action or do i want to actually talk about a thing and where this leads us by the way in that light i can also point out as a footnote what could be added and have here word choice of course also makes a difference in this case i had investigate and discover uh in that sense keep in mind there are also other words and look how they would change what you're talking about if you look at study inquiry probe those have different what we call connotations so to an investigation and a probe have a very different connotation very different sense an emotional mode as it were then a word like study or inquiry do and by the same token discovery versus finding revelation and detection to discover to find to reveal to detect those are very distinct words they have very distinct qualities as it were and that's something we're going to come back to very very quickly in looking at this that but at the end of the day what are we all about well if we look at this the basics of any professional communication certainly legal communication is clarity brevity variety what are you trying to do in each case you want to be as clear as you possibly can in most cases you want to be as brief as you possibly can but you also want to be as varied as you possibly can so you don't want to use overly repetitive language because that will in that sense turn off your readership they'll they'll whether or not they actually cease to actually read what you're doing is not necessarily a case but they will start stop reading with the attentiveness that you desire of them they won't be as compelled to be as you would like them to be okay now where we left off is we're looking at as I said kind of bringing this all together and I said you this leads you to kind of one of the first kind of key lessons in all written communication but certainly written communication in English and certainly written communication in English about the law is that it all comes down to the banner of clarity brevity and variety however what you do see within this is that your mission will determine to what degree each of these things will play a greater role or a lesser role and the degree to which you can actually define something as for example being brief or varied and I want to show you something because one of the things again within the field of the law that's often that often throws people a little bit off is if you look at let's see if you look at the basics of persuasive communication if you look at that slide it says that there are in fact two traditions that are very heavily represented within the field of the law and they're there and they're both very very different because they have to do with a distinction between in that sense what you might call logical persuasion versus maybe a more a more ethical or moral form of persuasion and what's interesting is there's an author and I'll give you the reference in this course as well Brian Garner and he's a scholar of legal English in the United States and he often breaks these things down and says that you have essentially two styles and the one is what is known as the attic style and this is the argument for proof so when you're arguing in order to in essence prove a point you use what's called the plain style or the attic style but you also have what's called the vigorous style the persuasive style and this is often referred to as the asiatic and it has to do with where they originated as schools of rhetoric the the first being if I'm correct more central Greece and the second being more in the Middle East so hence the term attic versus asiatic but what are we talking about here again the reference I can give you that it's from elements of legal style Brian Garner a really good book by the way if you actually if you're looking for any single author that you really want to say this is a good person welcome back to have a good look at is I would say Garner is definitely someone to look into the only thing that I do have to add is a caveat is it does have an American bias because he is from the United States so all of his usages are American English the spelling is American English you do have to if you're coming from the British school of learning that takes a little bit of getting used to but as he said what he has to say remains valid for all forms of English but as I said what are we talking about here well this is basically that conflicts between as I said for I now finally truly have an audience that will really appreciate this it's very much the language of the judiciary is that often what you'll see is that people say that for example the the language of judicial rulings can come across as being somewhat obtuse or and by that I mean opaque not you know so not very transparent and somewhat flowery and verbose a lot of words are being used to say what many people say is often very little but the truth is there are often reasons for this and I want to show you something as how this plays out so if you look at for example the slide on the attic this is by way of Oliver Wendell Holmes one of the great US jurists and he was very much a writer in the attic mode of of doing things and in this respect if we look at this particular text I'll just read off the the board persecution for the expression of opinion seems to be perfectly logical if you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes and law and sweep away all opposition so in essence what he's saying is he's talking in this case about a case that had to do with censorship laws and he's saying that we need in a sense why do we need to be so wary of censorship and why do we in fact need to guard against infringements upon free speech because it is so logical for any government to want to do this it makes perfect sense if you're in power you don't want criticism because criticism could lead to your downfall or you're being hindered in your job so and he just basically puts it out there just like that and I can to allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think speech impotent so yes no indeed we need to guard against this not because it's a frivolity on the part of government but because it's an absolute instinct to want to do this and he says it very very clearly he puts that forward in by basically saying just that this is as plain as the nose on your face speaking of which another Holmes's rulings he was talking likewise about it had to do with a license of activity and freedom of movement and he said it must be kept in mind that my freedom of movement ends where my neighbor's nose begins now that's pretty straightforward I mean and that's very much what you would call the plain style but what he's doing there is he's putting points forward and letting them stand for themselves he's saying that basically I can put this point forward and walk away it stands as it stands but his colleague Benjamin Cardoso thought otherwise and if you look at the way he wrote and it's interesting this is from a ruling that was authored by Cardoso and you see here the irony is what he's actually first discussing is not actually the case in point but the type of language that he uses and he's talking about it with respect to the particular case the refined or artificial smelling a little of the lamp with its merits it has its dangers front less well kept in hand it verges at times upon preciousity and euphism held in due restraint it lends itself lends itself admirably to cases where there's need of delicate precision what he's arguing for is asianic language he's saying that that's what yes indeed it looks old-fashioned it can be uh uh euphistic in other words a lot of words for little being said preciousity an obsession with the precision of language but with due restraint it lends itself admirably where there is need of delicate precision and now where does he find this need for delicate precision i find no better organ on where the subject matter of discussion is the construction of a will with all its filigree of tentacles so basically he's saying yes people who write their final testaments their final wills they are complex but they need to be because they need to be precise they need to get to they need to be exact and they can be counted on to be obsessive about exactly what is needs to be done it takes place upon death the shades of nuances of difference the slender and fragile tracery that must be preserved unminigated and distinct now those are two very that's a stark difference and what you will often see is that you're going to be confronted with both that you will see cases you will have texts put before you that are unrelentingly attic that will come straight to the point but then you will have those texts that verge at times upon preciousity and euphism and you're going to be asked to find in a sense a sensible balance between those two in response and that's something that i do think is interesting in risk with respect to what we just discussed because now if we come back to our choices and possibilities what do we see let's look at these choices that i put out there the first one that i said was indeed voice so i said what can you do you have the active versus the passive so we come back to this again and what is then in that sense the choice well in an active sentence your actor undertakes whatever the activity of the verb is putting out there so john murdered the butler which if anyone who's familiar with the tradition of the great english murder mystery that would be a twist because usually it's the butler who winds up doing it in those murder mysteries here you he would be the victim but okay i digress slightly um but john murdered the butler that's an active sentence because john is undertaking whenever that activity is however it could be that what you're looking for is you want that to be switched now i said the first example of this the the key example in professional academic writing is to get rid of yourself you know i did x x was done those kind of things but it can also be to just recreate a different focus john murdered the butler but i could also say what's more interesting is who was murdered the butler was murdered by john and you do need to keep something in mind with sentences like this i try not to throw people off with in discussing voice as a grammatical principle with my own voice because the thing is when you speak you actually lose a little bit of the need for this because in speaking we can emphasize things by just stressing words so you can say yeah but john murdered the butler and then i don't have any need for a passive sentence but in writing you have to force the hand of your reader you can't count on them to place the stress where you necessarily might have it in your in your verbal expression so that's why this becomes a clean and effective policy and the other thing is what did i also say sometimes all other things being equal you want variety you actually just want to do use active and passive interchangeably to just make your text more dynamic so that also helps so yes completely wrong to use has been instead of was okay is it grammatically wrong to say the butler has been murdered by john no it's not but now comes the question why don't i use that here because that because what you just said is not the equivalent of the other sentence in other words the whole point is what do you what do we observe with the passive if you switch from an active to a passive sentence the only thing you're changing is the voice you're only changing the direction in that sense of where you're putting the accent but you're not changing the time frame okay now the time frame of the first sentence is a simple past the simple passive past tense of that verb murdered is was murder right has been murdered is a perfectly correct sentence but it says something different john has murdered the butler has murdered because then you get has murdered has been murdered and in fact i'm going to come to that very very soon because because but i'm very glad you asked that because that's one of the key things here is that you have to keep in mind that if you start editing texts you start looking to make those switches that you don't when it's direct when it's passive versus active you don't change the tense that you don't change the time frame because that can have a big effect let me ask you this uh what is the difference between saying john was the butler was murdered by john and the butler has been murdered by john it's subtle but it's there basically is it is it uh yeah and sense of time yeah it's the sense of time that's exactly it if you say john or the butler was murdered by john it's historical you're just saying something happened in the past butler's dead he was murdered by john but if you say the butler has been murdered by john you're using what's called a present perfect form that draws it into the present it's saying something started in the past and it still has an effect on the present so it would be for example the distinction uh of saying why don't you have any help well the butler has been murdered by john so he killed my help therefore now i don't have any help because something happened in the past uh it's the same one of the things i always say this is a great trick if you're writing for example anything about research or anything that relates to research or investigations that the distinction between saying something like uh it was found and it has been found is that if you say it was found it's historical then you're just listing all the things that happened to have been discovered in the past if you say something has been found then you're saying it was discovered in the past but it's relevant to what i'm going to be discussing right now so for example if i say saying well it has been discovered that in fact students who are learning a language tend to have differentiating levels of confidence as they progress then i'm saying that's relevant to you right now so that's actually a very useful one to keep in mind so in this sense does versus subject undergoes if you look at this then if you start looking at things with more than one component since uh in the slide on voice you have say three components test 50 candidates researcher assistant i will point out some of my slides are very much aimed at this crowd some of them i will admit uh i'm um corrupted by my more general audience which is usually uh in the science realm um look at this again what are we saying we gave the test to 50 subjects then the accent is on we by the way i'm not saying that that should never be the case i will point out that i said to you objectivity requires certain languages but sometimes you're required to express subjectivity as well and in that case you definitely want that first person uh i can point out qualitative research but also in that sense even within judicial opinions there is that moment where you step back and say you talk perhaps about i as a person relative to i as a judicial authority but you can also say the test was given to 50 subjects candidates but you can also say 50 candidates were given the test and see then the emphasis is again different different so in the second sentence it's really about the text but in the third sentence it's really about the number of candidates and see that really then creates different levels of emphasis and then and this is where it really gets nice with you folks now we come to the really interesting stuff is you're often being required and you don't even think about it really that way anymore you're often required within the law and certainly within the context of being a jurist so uh someone in the courts to draw on numerous other authorities and to attribute to those other authorities and the passive plus what we call reported speech which i'm going to discuss shortly plays into this in a big way because look at this type of sentence then you get things like this so attribution of ideas if you look at the slides for attribution of ideas economists believe that x is greater than y you get a lot of these types of sentences but then i can also say it is believed that x is greater than y and i can also then say x is believed to be greater than y and see now i'm incorporating in that final sentence or actually in the two that go economists believe that's very much an active sentence you can use that that's perfectly all right but if you say it is believed that x is greater than y that's creating what you call an existential it it's an abstract idea then you're just putting out there this is the belief and you're leaving it in that sense i will say somewhat in the open as to who believes it i'll point out that years ago i was given a poster it was a joke poster it was called translating from academies into english and one of the phrases what is said it is believed and the translation was i believe then it said it is widely believed i believe it and so does my thesis advisor and the translation for it is generally believed was everyone in our department believes it so that kind of tells you that sometimes this can be a little bit of a rhetorical trick but the fact is you can use that so then you get it is believed and then you get your statement but you can also break it down into saying i'm going to take one component from that thing and use that as a bridge x is believed to be greater than y and now i've got a really nice compact compelling sentence x is believed by many economists to be greater than y then i've got attribution and passive and compact sentence that's a really good construction to have because that's something that comes up all the time you're constantly being asked to incorporate as i said the wisdom of others the rulings of other parties and organs and also the knowledge of different fields into what it is that you yourself are talking about yeah then what you also have is for example this it formula one thing i do want to point out is watch if you look at this phrase for example the it formulation that i gave you it is believed x is one that should be avoided if you have say six or seven different components in your session sentence so if you look at the sentence on the slide where it says the it formulation is best if idea being attributed is not too unwieldy the sentence i gave is too unwieldy it doesn't actually work that well you start that with it is believed then you're going to wind up with a whole bunch of basically a grocery list of beliefs it would be best to then break that down into two constituent sentences so it is believed that on the one hand that why give me is is significant but it is mostly the case in the when measured against lm and all that kind of thing you have to then come up with something other than what i what i did on the whole by the way i would also say if you fill in stuff in those letters that sentence itself is a little bit of a nightmare it's grammatically correct but it would it would stop most people's hearts as i said the last slide that i have on voice then what you see is what does it do so voice can eliminate you from the paper or from the ruling or from the discussion or whatever you happen to be doing in terms of communication great a greater sense of distance and objectivity be useful in improving clarity and be useful in contributing to variety so in all of those points it's something that meets the standard of what was that we set out to do at the very beginning of the day now in that respect given the questions that were just asked i think it's very interesting uh where i'm going to go with the the next few slides because then in fact what i want to look at is direction so then if you look on the slide it starts to look at those possibilities direction then you'll see that that's where something distinctly different to statement plays because what's the difference with direction voice is about changing the focus within the sentence so you're saying you're looking and you're saying okay it's about you know active versus passive but when you're talking about direction then you're actually talking about who's saying what to whom and this is the distinction between what we call direct and indirect language now what's the problem with direct versus indirect language well the problem is quite simple that is that you make a lot of shifts when you shift away from yourself as the speaker but become someone else's speaker um here give me an example of this if i say um there is no test in this there is no final exam in this course that's my state there is no final exam in this course if you were to say that to her one week from today so she asked you what did mark say about a final test what would you say that there will be no final exam in the course yeah see you're making a shift intense that's what i'm talking about because you wouldn't say you wouldn't by necessity say there is no final test anymore by the way i'll point out in a minute that you actually can't but you generally you shift to a different format so for example if you're thinking about this as something that is future based then you might use a future reference you said well don't worry mark said that there will there won't be a final exam so in the future you're using my general statement and turning it into a future form however you could just as easily made it historical well last week he said there would not be a final there isn't there was no final test for the course you make it a simple past because then you're talking you're saying what did he say at the time you're just making a shift into the past tense but in this case i could argue if it was one week from today the course is still going on then you could also say there is no final test he said there is no final test because what he stated was a universal it's still true so what you see there is you get a lot more complex a higher level of complexity however there are a few general things that you can always do with this now the first thing i want to show you is how we make this bridge from what i was just discussing to what we're going to now because if you look at the first slide on direction it's actually not really as much about direction as it is still about passive sentences and direction because what's being said they say he is quite mad now what can i do with that they say he is quite mad maybe i don't want to talk about who said it i just want to talk about what is being said then i would say it is said that he is quite mad or again using our splitting up i could look and say what is being said i'll split into two components he has said what is he said to be to be quite mad but why can i do this if you look again look at the slide if the tense in the reported statement is the same as in the reporting clause what's a reporting clause those are all those little mini sentences like he said she stated they pointed out it they this you know johnson argued any phrase like that that's called a reporting clause it has a tense in this case it's basically a passive presence so it's present tense if that sentence that little sentence has the same time denotation the same tense as whatever is being said he is quite mad which is also in the present then that latter case becomes an infinitive he is said to be quite mad but if you switch it up they say he was quite mad now the first one is they say that's your reporting statement your reporting clause that's in the present tense but the second one is not it's in the past tense then what you see is you said it is said that he was quite mad that stays the same you get the same type of construction but that latter one that then becomes he is said to have been quite mad and that's how they always work so as soon as you have if you have similarity then you get an infinitive if you have difference then you get what's called a perfective infinitive to have been you see how it works and he said this is this is a complex one but it's also and again they argued that this is the case this was argued this is argued to have been the case see they stated that this was relevant to law this was our this was stated to be relative relevant to law because now it's consistent but yeah but can you tell something more about the content of the differences between the one and for the meaning differs when you use it it's not it has not the same meaning when you say when you used to one when infinitive or the perfective infinitive yeah because but that's the thing it has to and what it's changing is it's showing you that there's an inconsistency so basically what you're saying is you're pointing out that if that in as soon as you give a perfective infinitive then you're saying whatever whatever tense you have in your reporting phrase is not the tense that was used in the in the other one so basically you can can assume is something is being said in uh stated as being in the present in the present but you get a to have been kind of construction then what you're looking at is something that was probably stated to have been in the past now in this case this I will absolutely point out to you you had an objection about they the one thing you do have to be careful about with all reported speech and this is why in fact in many in legal argument you often see direct citation and not as much indirect citation is this is an area where ambiguity can become a real big issue in other words the degree to which one thing means one or the other thing to give you an example of this say I say something like this this is a straightforward reported construction so it's not even as fancy as this um I was a teacher for 25 years now if I said that and someone reported on that weeks later what would they say well how do you shift a past tense in a reported speech you should get a past perfective and I have a lit I have a schema for this I'm going to show it to you folks so don't worry about that so you get what did Mark say Mark said that he had been a teacher for 25 years but what if I said something different what if I had said in class I have been a teacher for 25 years the reported speech of that would be exactly the same he said that he had been a teacher for 25 years so now it's no longer clear whether I'm still a teacher at the moment speech or not and that can be problematic so that's one that you have to absolutely watch out for and in that sense you have to also guard when you're looking at other people writing texts for you or to you you say yeah but what was literally said if it's not going to become clear from what's said in that statement you might want to rephrase that or in that sense uh uh add for example editorial remarks that you know that you know at the time he stated that he had been a teacher for 25 years that kind of suggests still going on at that moment so then you would have then you assume it's has been as close as it was but I said that's something you have to watch for so indirect or reported speech break this down look at it more directly if we look at direction so the slide there indirect versus direct speech what do you see indirect or reported speech contains reporting clause and main clause consisting of the state being reported Sam said what did Sam say that he did not like green eggs and am which is uh which is actually an infamous miscitation of anyone who knows English children's literature uh it was Sam who actually liked green eggs and am it was the other guy he was talking to who refused them consistently but I have my moments of odd humor and also have raised someone to the age of 26 I feel I have certain license when it comes to children's literature um so first of all what's that component what does it say there you have reporting speech has a reporting clause so yeah you have all these things these reporting verbs that are out there things like to say to argue to object to respond to claim and see this is what I was saying keep this in mind though that when you do this there is also a further kind of thing that can be confusing and that is that you uh you have to first of all also keep in mind that some verbs are transitive now dig back to high school English or Latin because that's an issue there as well what do transitive verbs require that in transitive verbs do not the word kind of says it's transiting from one to another what do you need in a transition like that transitive verbs always need an indirect object so in other words you can say something period he said this was not the case but you can't tell something period you have to tell someone something you always need a target in a transitive verb so as soon as you get verbs in this case uh like to tell or to ask you always have to ask someone something you have to tell someone something so that has to be incorporated so in other words even when you're reporting jack told jill that this was the case but jack said that this was the case as possible because you don't have to involve indirect object other thing is that there are a couple of verbs that actually don't work in reported speech in the sense of you have a reported speech version of them but then they basically become the ing form of themselves so for example words like deny and suggest you don't actually say something like you generally don't say john suggests suggest or what's i looking for uh you don't say something like john suggested that we should go to this you would say something like john suggested going then you get these really you don't he don't say he denied that he had been there at that time he denied being there at that time so then what you get is the reporting verb is all right but as a reporting verb it makes it impossible to follow it with a regular reported speech formulation so you always wind up with one of these ing kind of things so denied doing suggested going etc etc