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> that admonition is everywhere Generally speaking, I think it's because this advice is very easy to remember and repeat. Passive voice is easy to spot. Someon
by sharedfrog 7y ago
> that admonition is everywhere
Generally speaking, I think it's because this advice is very easy to remember and repeat. Passive voice is easy to spot. Someone reading to look for errors can easily go "Aha! You did a naughty here." because they were once told that "passive = bad".
- msla 7y ago> Passive voice is easy to spot. A whole list of evidence to the contrary: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives.html#passivepostlist http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives.html#passivepostlis... For example: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1504 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1504 > "On religious tolerance, he gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the 'divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence' (note the use of the passive voice)." The only way that statement is in the "passive voice" is if you want to ding the speaker for not blaming someone specific; that is, it's only in the passive voice in the political sense. Grammatically, it's in the active voice. Here's a piece on what the passive voice is: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922
- draw_down 7y agoYes, that's exactly my issue. People see it and just immediately throw up the red flag as if it were an actual grammatical/syntactic error.