syntactic patterning, passive voice and nominalisation

Parallelism

• The repetition of syntactic structures. Function can be to create rhythm in a speech, help an audience to remember information or bring emphasis to important information

  • “I’m willing to tell you: I’m wanting to tell you: I’m waiting to tell you”

antithesis

• Pairing phrases or clauses that contrast or are opposite to each other in meaning

Listing

• A list of words or phrases. This is to highlight and emphasise a point or information. Also often in legal contracts or bureaucratic writing to cover all possible eventualities.

Passive voice

• When a subject is not the agent who performs the action of the verb

  • The snake was killed by the dog

  • Subject of the sentence is the snake, but it is not doing the killing action. The “to be” verb is before the action

Why use passive voice

• to control the flow of information and the order of ideas in the text

• to remove the agent of the action because

  • it is not important

  • avoid identifying who is to blame or is responsible for the action

  • to maintain authority by making discourse impersonal

nominalisation

• to turn a word or phrase into a noun

• most commonly happens with a verbs and adjectives

  • react (verb) → reaction (nominalised noun)

  • we evaluated and explained the results of the profits (verb phrase) → an evaluation and explanation of results showed the profits (nominalised noun phrase)