Lost in translation

So I recently bought a new alarm clock online die to problems with the cell phone alarm (I have to leave the ringer on to have the alarm go off, but people text me at obscene hours and wake me up) and the instructions were incredibly poorly translated. This was not the greatest offence by a long shot however. The clock has AM and PM backwards on the alarm settings, thus, my alarm did not go off this morning, but instead, I woke up at almost noon. Just another example of things being problematic due to a lack of proofreading or quality control. Theres a general attitude of sloppiness that I see everywhere today, and it really grinds my gears.

Millitary Grammar

i was watching a TV show that had a boot camp scene in it, and noticed the soldiers going "SIR YES SIR" This is peculiar construction that in any other circumstances seems ridiculous. You don't see people going around saying "Bob, yes bob." It is a unique form of speech used in the military, and is instantly identifiable. It almost feels as if this construction is there to help differentiate military life from civilian life.

Passive Voice

as a psychology major, I am required to write everything in an "active voice" and avoid the "passive voice". This is something I have had a great deal of difficulty with on occsaision, as there are often phrases that seem to flow better in the passive voice than the active. In addition, I had some confusion as to what constitutes passive voice vs active voice. according to the writing center at the University of South Carolina Chapel Hill, "A passive construction occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence. That is, whoever or whatever is performing the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence. Take a look at this passive rephrasing of a familiar joke:Why was the road crossed by the chicken? "

This is an obvious example of the passive voice, but there are a number of less obvious ways to fall into using the passive voice, especially when writing about scientific research. Here is an example from one of my own papers.

"The research was conducted in a classroom setting"

this sentence does not seem to be stylistically "bad", but under APA style guidelines, this sewntence had to be changed to

"We conducted the research in a classroom study"