English Language & Usage Asked by Emma Zhou on August 16, 2020
“A car rammed into counter-protesters during a violent white nationalist rally,” for example, is a sentence that may legitimately be criticized for neglecting to point out that someone was at the wheel of said car; in this case, though, the avoidance of explicit agency is a moral failure, not a grammatical one.”
Could anyone help me understand the meaning of “agency” in this paragraph? I did check it in a dictionary but still I have no idea.
agency, noun
2: the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power : OPERATION
Answered by Ian MacDonald on August 16, 2020
"Avoidance of explicit agency" is referring to the way that the article does not attribute the action to the driver--opting instead to personify and implicate the vehicle.
Agency in this sense is choice and freedom of action. The driver was in control of the vehicle and made the choice to drive into the protesters, and the critic is accusing the author of minimizing that.
Answered by Bryan Agee on August 16, 2020
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