To be fair, the author did say: > There are times when the passive voice is acceptable in technical writing. > I also believe, as with adverbs, that removal o

To be fair, the author did say: > There are times when the passive voice is acceptable in technical writing. > I also believe, as with adverbs, that removal of the passive voice would have been a net improvement for over half the technical writing I've edited. (That is, students abuse the passive voice more often than they use it well.) The author himself is not against passive voice. He simply has not found that students have used it appropriately. I myself was a bit humored by the way in which this article, while probably well founded, probably violates some of its own advice in that it is not backing up claims with data and facts, but generalizations which have come from personal experience.