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I really don't get what's wrong with passive voice at all. In my mother tongue (Turkish) and my L3 (Italian) passive voice is a part of the educated speech. C

by gkya 10y ago

I really don't get what's wrong with passive voice at all. In my mother tongue (Turkish) and my L3 (Italian) passive voice is a part of the educated speech. Certainly it is harder to use than direct speech (in most cases), but why neglect it?

actuallyalys 10y ago
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the passive voice, but people overuse it. For example, I've edited technical documents that used the passive voice so frequently that I lost track of what was being done by the user and what was being done automatically.
- gkya 10y ago
  Okay, but why throw the baby out with the bathwater?
  - actuallyalys 10y ago
    I don't think anyone seriously advocates avoiding it entirely. For example, even Strunk and White say: "This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary." (http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html#11 http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html#11)
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Because it's not a case of baby and bathwater, where the thing you don't want to throw is millions of times more valuable than the one you want to throw away. Here, the two things that might be thrown away are of the same value (justifiable passive voice vs unjustifiable passive voice), and it's not that big a value to begin with. Plus, you have a perfectly good replacement (active voice). Lastly, it's just a general advice for people who overuse unjustified passive voice. It's not supposed to be subtle. If those people could understand subtlety they'd kept the justified passive voice themselves when it's appropriate.
schoen 10y ago
I agree with the criticism of the criticism of the passive voice (that is, I think it's often appropriate to use it, and a blanket prohibition is wrong). A couple of ideas: * There's an idea that passive voice is inappropriate because it "avoids responsibility" (for example, because it does not say who made a decision or performed an action, where that information might be important). An example could be when an organization says "your application was denied" (where it would somehow seem more honest or more relevant to say "we denied your application" or "the vice president denied your application"), or in a political context referring to violence without referring to the perpetrator of that violence -- "thirty people were killed" (by whom?). However, critics have pointed out that these concerns don't correspond perfectly to the active/passive voice distinction, among other things because we can still state who was responsible when using the passive voice and because we can still avoid stating who was responsible when using the active voice. Also, sometimes clear or honest writing wouldn't need to assign responsibility at every moment, in every context, or in every sentence. * There's an idea that the passive voice is inappropriate because it sounds too formal and hence makes writing less accessible, less enjoyable to read, or lends the writing an unwarranted air of authority. The active voice may sound more direct or straightforward in many contexts, while the passive voice may sound unduly formal, abstract, or academic. This is probably also true, but doesn't appear to justify a blanket prohibition either. * Edit: also compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime, a writing style that tries to avoid using the copula (certain uses of the verb "to be"), based on the view that it makes philosophically unjustified observer-independent claims that could be made more precise by showing whose perception or belief is being described (like "spinach is yucky" vs. "George H. W. Bush dislikes spinach" or "George H. W. Bush finds spinach yucky"). The copula isn't the same as the passive voice, but this is a (controversial) example of another way in which people have suggested constraining their writing in support of "taking responsibility" for certain propositions or observations.
- gkya 10y ago
  A response for each of you points, not really for starting an argument, but for stating my view of the matter. 1) The language allows you to emphasise either the object or the subject. Either way, though, both a passive and an active version of a given sentence can hide or tell some information equally. Compare: The pizza was eaten. Somebody ate the pizza. (The amount of info these sentences give is practically equivalent.) It's more about the author, whether or not he wants to tell something to the reader. 2) Passive need not be formal in all its uses, nor does every text need be formal and accessible, and a formal text is not necessarily inaccessible. 3) That's a crazy nitpicking and a silly exaggeration. Copula-heavy text is boring to read, but while the copula verb and the auxiliary verb for passive forms are the same (to be), in its second role, it is not also acting as a copula. The verb 'to be' is not the copula, but one of its uses is as the copula. So if one wants to give up on copula, however mad that may be, he need not give up on all the uses of the verb to be. That said, if it is an artistic choice to avoid copula to the extent possible, I can't really criticise that. It can't be affirmed as a general rule though. Edit: Oh, also, in a sentence like "Bob seems terrible.", 'to seem' is basically a copula. Copula is basically any verb that links the subject to a predicative.
deleted 10y ago
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by gkya 10y ago

actuallyalys 10y ago

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the passive voice, but people overuse it. For example, I've edited technical documents that used the passive voice so frequently that I lost track of what was being done by the user and what was being done automatically.

gkya 10y ago
Okay, but why throw the baby out with the bathwater?
- actuallyalys 10y ago
  I don't think anyone seriously advocates avoiding it entirely. For example, even Strunk and White say: "This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary." (http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html#11 http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html#11)
- coldtea 10y ago
  Because it's not a case of baby and bathwater, where the thing you don't want to throw is millions of times more valuable than the one you want to throw away. Here, the two things that might be thrown away are of the same value (justifiable passive voice vs unjustifiable passive voice), and it's not that big a value to begin with. Plus, you have a perfectly good replacement (active voice). Lastly, it's just a general advice for people who overuse unjustified passive voice. It's not supposed to be subtle. If those people could understand subtlety they'd kept the justified passive voice themselves when it's appropriate.

schoen 10y ago

I agree with the criticism of the criticism of the passive voice (that is, I think it's often appropriate to use it, and a blanket prohibition is wrong). A couple of ideas: * There's an idea that passive voice is inappropriate because it "avoids responsibility" (for example, because it does not say who made a decision or performed an action, where that information might be important). An example could be when an organization says "your application was denied" (where it would somehow seem more honest or more relevant to say "we denied your application" or "the vice president denied your application"), or in a political context referring to violence without referring to the perpetrator of that violence -- "thirty people were killed" (by whom?). However, critics have pointed out that these concerns don't correspond perfectly to the active/passive voice distinction, among other things because we can still state who was responsible when using the passive voice and because we can still avoid stating who was responsible when using the active voice. Also, sometimes clear or honest writing wouldn't need to assign responsibility at every moment, in every context, or in every sentence. * There's an idea that the passive voice is inappropriate because it sounds too formal and hence makes writing less accessible, less enjoyable to read, or lends the writing an unwarranted air of authority. The active voice may sound more direct or straightforward in many contexts, while the passive voice may sound unduly formal, abstract, or academic. This is probably also true, but doesn't appear to justify a blanket prohibition either. * Edit: also compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime, a writing style that tries to avoid using the copula (certain uses of the verb "to be"), based on the view that it makes philosophically unjustified observer-independent claims that could be made more precise by showing whose perception or belief is being described (like "spinach is yucky" vs. "George H. W. Bush dislikes spinach" or "George H. W. Bush finds spinach yucky"). The copula isn't the same as the passive voice, but this is a (controversial) example of another way in which people have suggested constraining their writing in support of "taking responsibility" for certain propositions or observations.

gkya 10y ago
A response for each of you points, not really for starting an argument, but for stating my view of the matter. 1) The language allows you to emphasise either the object or the subject. Either way, though, both a passive and an active version of a given sentence can hide or tell some information equally. Compare: The pizza was eaten. Somebody ate the pizza. (The amount of info these sentences give is practically equivalent.) It's more about the author, whether or not he wants to tell something to the reader. 2) Passive need not be formal in all its uses, nor does every text need be formal and accessible, and a formal text is not necessarily inaccessible. 3) That's a crazy nitpicking and a silly exaggeration. Copula-heavy text is boring to read, but while the copula verb and the auxiliary verb for passive forms are the same (to be), in its second role, it is not also acting as a copula. The verb 'to be' is not the copula, but one of its uses is as the copula. So if one wants to give up on copula, however mad that may be, he need not give up on all the uses of the verb to be. That said, if it is an artistic choice to avoid copula to the extent possible, I can't really criticise that. It can't be affirmed as a general rule though. Edit: Oh, also, in a sentence like "Bob seems terrible.", 'to seem' is basically a copula. Copula is basically any verb that links the subject to a predicative.

deleted 10y ago

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