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The sentence "The passive voice is overused." illustrates this tension well. When you omit the subject, (implicitly we all know who that sentence is referring t
by wyuenho 6y ago
The sentence "The passive voice is overused." illustrates this tension well. When you omit the subject, (implicitly we all know who that sentence is referring to), passive voice is more concise, but it's not clearer. It's actually less clear because there's less information available. I think this is the distinction most commentator miss.
In programming languages we often find better, we prefer explicitness over implicitness if the language is already designed to be very concise. Case in point: Python.
- dllthomas 6y agoThe passive lets you omit the subject gramatically. In every case, you can include an informative or uninformative subject. If you are including an uninformative subject, the passive is probably clearer. The clearest is not the most informative; the clearest provides the most important information and the least distracting information. "Helicopters were used to control the blaze" is no less clear than "the blaze was controlled using helicopters". And, assuming the news item is about the trajectory of the fire, it is much more clear than "Pilot John Smith, having just moved to the area from Baltimore where he attended school with a 3.7 GPA, helped control the blaze with a fire department helicopter" despite that offering quite a bit more information. To your explicit claim, I contend that "the passive voice is overused" would not be made clearer phrased "writers overuse the passive voice".