4 ms·

Any tool that uses passive voice as a heuristic for good versus bad writing is immediately suspect. And any writer who uses such a tool for validation is unlik

Any tool that uses passive voice as a heuristic for good versus bad writing is immediately suspect. And any writer who uses such a tool for validation is unlikely to be a good judge of writing to begin with.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Is what you meant that it is suspect to have passive voice being used as a heuristic?
- tim333 6y ago
  The article mentions "8 use of passive voice" in the app's report.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    All these types of apps do that, sometimes with a recommended max guideline. It's not a terrible heuristic like "Never use passive voice" is. Over some threshold, there's probably too much of it.
inglor_cz 6y ago
Writer here, reasonably competent, because people pay me for writing (in Czech; forgive me my English errors). Passive voice in narration is ... strange most of the time. It kicks the reader out of the situation, like Out-of-body experience, only it is an Out-of-book experience. "John was killed by the assassins, his body was later discovered by a cleaning lady, carried out by morticians and dissected by pathologists." It is pretty hard to feel any emotions around this almost technically cold description. A sentence like this could have come from a police dossier. I am not a friend of software validation tools in this regard, though. Capturing the essence of beauty in words isn't a solved problem.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Your written English is superb. It's indistinguishable from that of a literate native speaker.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Glad to hear that, thank you! Slavs in general tend to struggle with "a/an/the" in English, because most Slavic languages lack articles. Out of the entire language family, only Bulgarian uses definite articles. Articles feel unnatural to me, too. I got used to them, but in a similar way that one gets used to a prosthetic arm: you can do things, but it feels mechanic and distant.
    - yesenadam 6y ago
      > it feels mechanic and distant. Just like the passive voice, then? *mechanical
- jfengel 6y ago
  Just for comparison, in the active voice: "The assassins killed John, the cleaning lady discovered his body later, the morticians carried him out and the pathologists dissected him." It is better, though not massively so. It's tighter. (Personally I'd break it into four sentences, but that's just me. I also would have used an Oxford comma, for that matter.) The real problem is that the passive voice can be used for: "John was killed, his body was later discovered, carried out, and dissected". It's definitely punchy, and as the beginning of a thriller novel its vagueness could be exciting. But any place else you're left mostly with questions. It would be terrible in a newspaper account. And in an actual police report, it would sound like somebody was covering something up.

alisonkisk 6y ago

Is what you meant that it is suspect to have passive voice being used as a heuristic?

tim333 6y ago
The article mentions "8 use of passive voice" in the app's report.
- ghaff 6y ago
  All these types of apps do that, sometimes with a recommended max guideline. It's not a terrible heuristic like "Never use passive voice" is. Over some threshold, there's probably too much of it.

inglor_cz 6y ago

Writer here, reasonably competent, because people pay me for writing (in Czech; forgive me my English errors). Passive voice in narration is ... strange most of the time. It kicks the reader out of the situation, like Out-of-body experience, only it is an Out-of-book experience. "John was killed by the assassins, his body was later discovered by a cleaning lady, carried out by morticians and dissected by pathologists." It is pretty hard to feel any emotions around this almost technically cold description. A sentence like this could have come from a police dossier. I am not a friend of software validation tools in this regard, though. Capturing the essence of beauty in words isn't a solved problem.

tomcam 6y ago
Your written English is superb. It's indistinguishable from that of a literate native speaker.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Glad to hear that, thank you! Slavs in general tend to struggle with "a/an/the" in English, because most Slavic languages lack articles. Out of the entire language family, only Bulgarian uses definite articles. Articles feel unnatural to me, too. I got used to them, but in a similar way that one gets used to a prosthetic arm: you can do things, but it feels mechanic and distant.
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    > it feels mechanic and distant. Just like the passive voice, then? *mechanical
jfengel 6y ago
Just for comparison, in the active voice: "The assassins killed John, the cleaning lady discovered his body later, the morticians carried him out and the pathologists dissected him." It is better, though not massively so. It's tighter. (Personally I'd break it into four sentences, but that's just me. I also would have used an Oxford comma, for that matter.) The real problem is that the passive voice can be used for: "John was killed, his body was later discovered, carried out, and dissected". It's definitely punchy, and as the beginning of a thriller novel its vagueness could be exciting. But any place else you're left mostly with questions. It would be terrible in a newspaper account. And in an actual police report, it would sound like somebody was covering something up.