5 ms·

The obsession with eliminating passive voice drives me nuts. It is absolutely okay to use passive voice. Or maybe it would be better to say it should be okay to

The obsession with eliminating passive voice drives me nuts. It is absolutely okay to use passive voice. Or maybe it would be better to say it should be okay to use passive voice.

microcolonel 9y ago
Attribution is important to descriptions of reality. Passive voice obscures attribution, giving a distorted or incomplete impression of reality. There are cases where passive voice does not harm attribution, or where lack of attribution serves a purpose, but as a general rule it's worth avoiding.
- luckydata 9y ago
  in software specifications and jounralism fine. In prose it's lunacy and shit advice. That's the problem of the one trick pony education style we happen to have in the US. Lack of nuance from teachers is appalling. Growing up in Europe I got a much wider exposure to history, philosophy and other humanistic subjects than my american wife ever had (and ironically she's the art history major...).
jcelerier 9y ago
> The obsession with eliminating passive voice drives me nuts. ... people are trying to do this ? Passive voice is the only way to have a meaningful conversation.
mrob 9y ago
For example, consider the famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." The joke only works in passive voice. If you attribute it to a specific person or group then it's no longer comical wishful thinking, it's just plain wrong. Sometimes vagueness is beneficial.
- draw_down 9y ago
  Pride and Prejudice, you say? Must have been written by some rube.
- 1123581321 9y ago
  Close — it’s because this kind of wanting is a passive, chronic want that may or may not be acted on with the right amount of forwardness, as the novel demonstrates. You could rewrite the sentence as “a single man...wants a wife” and talk about exactly the same group (men with a fortune) so that’s not where the inaccuracy lies.
munificent 9y ago
The fundamental problem with advice is that it aims to get the listener to a point X but is phrased as a delta that presumes the listener is currently at Y and states what change to make to get to X from there. If you look at basically every critique of some advice, it boils down to that core issue. Often, people acknowledge this by saying, "Well, you need to know whether or not the advice applies to you." But that generally requires a level of sophistication the reader doesn't have. If they did, they wouldn't need the advice in the first place. I'm not sure if there's a good solution to the problem. I think we tend to express advice in terms of a delta because it's more compact and because it's more directly actionable. Compare, "avoid passive voice" with "approximately 80% of your sentences should use active voice in most styles of writing however the fraction should be higher in narrative fiction and nonfiction and lower in academic writing." In this case, "avoid passive voice" is a pretty good delta, statistically speaking. Most writers use passive voice too much. I have seen very little writing that uses too little passive voice. Those who don't overuse passive voice tend to be self-aware enough to know the advice doesn't apply to them. If you were to apply that advice to a large corpus of randomly selected text, you'd make more of it better than you made worse.
- jasode 9y ago
  >In this case, "avoid passive voice" is a pretty good delta, statistically speaking. Most writers use passive voice too much. Exactly. Passive voice is the easier default for most writers and unfortunately, it lacks punch. Example of a classic passive voice sentence: "Mistakes were made." Writers love hiding behind passive constructions like that. But the reader wants to know _who_ made the mistake. If possible, write the agent into the sentence: "Nixon made mistakes." or "Kissinger made mistakes." There was a writing style book that compared 10-K annual financial reports from companies that got hit by accounting scandals (Enron, Worldcom) vs clean companies (Berkshire Hathaway & Warren Buffet). There was a significantly more passive voice sentences in the dishonest companies. In contrast, Warren Buffet writes in a lively active-voice style ("I invested in this. I lost money on that.") (I wonder if there's a hedge fund that uses text analysis software to scan 10-K filings to quantify which company is overusing passive-voice as a parameter to their models.)
qznc 9y ago
I do check my texts for passive voice and turn a lot into active voice. However, sometimes I do prefer passive. An example from the abstract of my (unpublished) dissertation: Exploiting special hardware is a well-known technique to lower energy consumption, which is another important aspect that must be balanced with raw performance. I don't want to use active voice, because at this point nobody cares who does the balancing. Using you (...that you must balance...) seems not suitable in an abstract.
- mhb 9y ago
  The passive voice issue is secondary to the other issues of the sentence: 1) Ambiguous antecedent - to what does "which" refer - special hardware? Lower energy consumption? 2) Exploiting is not a noun. "The exploitation of special hardware..." Perhaps: A well-known technique to lower energy consumption is the exploitation of special hardware. ...
  - hDeraj 9y ago
    Exploiting can be a noun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund
ashark 9y ago
People overuse it a lot, hence the backlash. I think it seems "fancy" or businesslike to some people (it's the opposite) and others just don't think about their writing enough to notice the weak tone, needless misdirection, and wasted words that result from using passive in too many cases where active would do. Most of the time, in most people's writing, switching most of the passive-voiced sentences to active will improve the writing. As with all writing rules, you don't need to follow it if you know what you're doing—by definition, since knowing-what-you're-doing means (among other things) not accidentally using the passive voice where active would have better served your purposes, but using it only when you want its particular effects.

The obsession with eliminating passive voice drives me nuts. It is absolutely okay to use passive voice. Or maybe it would be better to say it should be okay to use passive voice.

microcolonel 9y ago

Attribution is important to descriptions of reality. Passive voice obscures attribution, giving a distorted or incomplete impression of reality. There are cases where passive voice does not harm attribution, or where lack of attribution serves a purpose, but as a general rule it's worth avoiding.

luckydata 9y ago
in software specifications and jounralism fine. In prose it's lunacy and shit advice. That's the problem of the one trick pony education style we happen to have in the US. Lack of nuance from teachers is appalling. Growing up in Europe I got a much wider exposure to history, philosophy and other humanistic subjects than my american wife ever had (and ironically she's the art history major...).

jcelerier 9y ago

> The obsession with eliminating passive voice drives me nuts. ... people are trying to do this ? Passive voice is the only way to have a meaningful conversation.

mrob 9y ago

For example, consider the famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." The joke only works in passive voice. If you attribute it to a specific person or group then it's no longer comical wishful thinking, it's just plain wrong. Sometimes vagueness is beneficial.

draw_down 9y ago
Pride and Prejudice, you say? Must have been written by some rube.
1123581321 9y ago
Close — it’s because this kind of wanting is a passive, chronic want that may or may not be acted on with the right amount of forwardness, as the novel demonstrates. You could rewrite the sentence as “a single man...wants a wife” and talk about exactly the same group (men with a fortune) so that’s not where the inaccuracy lies.

munificent 9y ago

The fundamental problem with advice is that it aims to get the listener to a point X but is phrased as a delta that presumes the listener is currently at Y and states what change to make to get to X from there. If you look at basically every critique of some advice, it boils down to that core issue. Often, people acknowledge this by saying, "Well, you need to know whether or not the advice applies to you." But that generally requires a level of sophistication the reader doesn't have. If they did, they wouldn't need the advice in the first place. I'm not sure if there's a good solution to the problem. I think we tend to express advice in terms of a delta because it's more compact and because it's more directly actionable. Compare, "avoid passive voice" with "approximately 80% of your sentences should use active voice in most styles of writing however the fraction should be higher in narrative fiction and nonfiction and lower in academic writing." In this case, "avoid passive voice" is a pretty good delta, statistically speaking. Most writers use passive voice too much. I have seen very little writing that uses too little passive voice. Those who don't overuse passive voice tend to be self-aware enough to know the advice doesn't apply to them. If you were to apply that advice to a large corpus of randomly selected text, you'd make more of it better than you made worse.

jasode 9y ago
>In this case, "avoid passive voice" is a pretty good delta, statistically speaking. Most writers use passive voice too much. Exactly. Passive voice is the easier default for most writers and unfortunately, it lacks punch. Example of a classic passive voice sentence: "Mistakes were made." Writers love hiding behind passive constructions like that. But the reader wants to know _who_ made the mistake. If possible, write the agent into the sentence: "Nixon made mistakes." or "Kissinger made mistakes." There was a writing style book that compared 10-K annual financial reports from companies that got hit by accounting scandals (Enron, Worldcom) vs clean companies (Berkshire Hathaway & Warren Buffet). There was a significantly more passive voice sentences in the dishonest companies. In contrast, Warren Buffet writes in a lively active-voice style ("I invested in this. I lost money on that.") (I wonder if there's a hedge fund that uses text analysis software to scan 10-K filings to quantify which company is overusing passive-voice as a parameter to their models.)

qznc 9y ago

I do check my texts for passive voice and turn a lot into active voice. However, sometimes I do prefer passive. An example from the abstract of my (unpublished) dissertation: Exploiting special hardware is a well-known technique to lower energy consumption, which is another important aspect that must be balanced with raw performance. I don't want to use active voice, because at this point nobody cares who does the balancing. Using you (...that you must balance...) seems not suitable in an abstract.

mhb 9y ago
The passive voice issue is secondary to the other issues of the sentence: 1) Ambiguous antecedent - to what does "which" refer - special hardware? Lower energy consumption? 2) Exploiting is not a noun. "The exploitation of special hardware..." Perhaps: A well-known technique to lower energy consumption is the exploitation of special hardware. ...
- hDeraj 9y ago
  Exploiting can be a noun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund

ashark 9y ago

People overuse it a lot, hence the backlash. I think it seems "fancy" or businesslike to some people (it's the opposite) and others just don't think about their writing enough to notice the weak tone, needless misdirection, and wasted words that result from using passive in too many cases where active would do. Most of the time, in most people's writing, switching most of the passive-voiced sentences to active will improve the writing. As with all writing rules, you don't need to follow it if you know what you're doing—by definition, since knowing-what-you're-doing means (among other things) not accidentally using the passive voice where active would have better served your purposes, but using it only when you want its particular effects.