3 ms·

These sound more like passive voice problems. It might seem silly, but the military has many good resources for writers. A silly one, for example: https://www

• Sniffnoy 7y ago
  None of these examples are passive constructions! (The first two don't even involve verbs.) Apologies for possibly being pedantic, but I do think this is necessary to point out. A lot of people seem to think that "passive" refers to statements that are vague about agency, or often something else vaguely along those lines. But active-vs-passive has nothing to do with that! Now one could say, well, that's just not how people are using the word "passive" these days; but the thing is, I don't think whatever notion people are trying to express via "passive" is a useful one. Sometimes it means "vague about who's responsible", but often it doesn't; I don't think there's a useful notion worth salvaging in there. Anyway for way more on this you can see Geoff Pullum's article on it[1], or the whole "passives" category[2] on Language Log... [1]http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf [2]https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54
  • swixmix 7y ago
    Thank you.