10 ms·

Seven Sins of Writing

129 points by paint 3y ago

grahamlee 3y ago
“Avoid the passive voice” is a rule that annoys me. Sometimes, the rule that’s annoying is more important than the person that’s being annoyed.
- version_five 3y ago
  There should be an (n+1)th rule for these lists that's break the rules when you want, just know you're breaking them and do it because you like the result better, not out of sloppiness.
  - smilespray 3y ago
    My teachers told me this is true for almost all lists of rules. YMMV.
    - Nevermark 3y ago
      Rules (which don’t involve courts & prisons) are just shorthand for reasons. The better you understand the reasons behind the rules, the easier it will be to know when to break them. Or, in an artistic sense, how best to dramatically or subtly break them in service to some creative perspective. Any of them! All of them! This is as true in architecture, rocket design, fashion and etiquette, as it is in prose. —- And this is why organizations that impose process without delegating and encouraging an organization-wide agency to make intentional exceptions, smother innovation so effectively. They lose most of their creative and adaptive abilities.
- screamingninja 3y ago
  > a rule that annoys me None of these are meant to be "rules" in my understanding. The post starts with "In most instances", so it leaves plenty of room for "exceptions" to the list based on what you intend to convey.
- enkid 3y ago
  The problem is that most people who say this don't know what the passive voice means. What they want to say is make the most important noun in the sentence the subject and keep the subject near the beginning of the sentence. That concept is only tangentially related to the grammatical voice being used.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Sometimes passive voice is the best way to do that though, because the subject of the action is more important (e.g. the target of a shooting rather than the shooter). Using active voice would either put the important person at the end, or might require you to find an alternative verb with reversed arguments, resulting in more awkward phrasing
    - enkid 3y ago
      Yes, passive voice is used effectively all the time. The rule was created by grammarian's who didn't understand its effectiveness or overstated its necessity. Judgement should be used to determine when it works.
msla 3y ago
Be clear about what the passive voice is: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 > It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; that The case took on racial overtones is in the passive; that Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened is in the passive; and so on. (Needless to say, none of those are in the passive voice. Of course, some people think questions are in the passive voice, so perhaps this education is a lost cause.) Moving on: > Concise writing is key to clear communication. Wordiness obscures your ideas and frustrates your reader. Make your points succinctly. The funny thing is, they wrote this without intending to be ironic. Finally: > Each student must meet with their advisor. They mark this as incorrect, which it is not, and which marks them as being innovative and ignorant. Innovative, in that they're trying to invent new rules for English to follow, and ignorant, in that they think they're being traditionalists. Cites: https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/singular-they-history https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/singular-they-history > The plural they originated around the 13th century, and it didn’t take long for its singular form to emerge. As professor and linguist Dennis Baron writes in a post at the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known instance of the singular they can be found in the medieval poem William and the Werewolf from 1375. A section translated from the Middle English to modern English reads, “Each man hurried [. . .] till they drew near [. . .] where William and his darling were lying together.” Because most language changes develop orally before they’re written down, this form of they likely had been in use for years by this point. https://web.archive.org/web/20200121102050/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/books/review/whats-your-pronoun-dennis-baron.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200121102050/https://www.nytim... https://archive.ph/jnODV https://archive.ph/jnODV > For the still unpersuaded, he points out that singular “they” is older than singular “you.” Only in the 1600s did singular “you” start pushing out “thou” and “thee.” Finally, this: > Each student must meet his or her advisor. Is marked as correct, but it isn't. Some people don't identify as "He" or "She" and trying to "Grammar" them into submission is simply idiotic.
- racktash 3y ago
  I was surprised when reading The Sense of Style by Pinker (not a book I would recommend incidentally) that the use of 'they' as a generic pronoun was still considered controversial. Pinker opts to alternate his chapters with he, then she, then he again – he explains this is to avoid the issue of having to otherwise use he/she type constructs. Had he used 'they', I would've never thought anything of it. Maybe it's a geographical thing?
cebert 3y ago
I’ve always seen recommendations to avoid passive voice in writing. However, when I encounter passive voice it doesn’t bother me. It also is one of my more frequent writing mistakes. Is this still considered bad practice?
- thfuran 3y ago
  As a general rule, yes.
- creata 3y ago
  Yes. Some people (especially when they're trying to sound formal or impartial) use the passive voice way too much.
- PakG1 3y ago
  The interesting question is if passive voice is so bad, how did it come about in the English language and why did it survive? That directly contradicts a lot of this advice. Though I try to use primarily active voice because it helps me save on word/page count when I'm trying to submit papers to conferences.
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
    Passive voice in itself is benign. It provides flexibility, and it lets you emphasize the target of an action, or the action itself over the do-er, if that fits your intent. Advice to avoid passive voice comes from a variety of reasons, but perhaps the most charitable (and I think useful) view would be: * In technical writing, you might have pick up passive voice because of misguided advice to use avoid "I" and "we". This naturally leads you to using passive voice all over the place. This makes the writing "seem more objective", but is really just the veneer of objectivity. And in some ways is the polar opposite of the advice to always avoid passive voice. English has both voices - use them both. If nothing else (and all other things were equal), active voice tends to be more concise - as you have noted - which is a true benefit for technical writing. * Passive voice is one of tools employed when weaseling or obfuscating (see the infamous "mistakes were made"). Advice to avoid the passive voice is either nudging you to either... just be more honest (don't weasel!), or to be more clever in your weaseling (because everyone knows the trick...) * Because use of passive voice in more mundane/banal communication is so common (or seemingly so common), there was a perception that people were just defaulting in the passive because that's what government officials, or companies or whatever talked like. And so the advice was pushback. Reminding you that you don't have to speak or write like a prepared government speech or press release.
martinjacobd 3y ago
I wish I understood what "wordiness" means. Perhaps it's restating the same simple point three times in as many loose sentences. People who harp on this point usually point to the writing of Hemingway and similar writers (Carver comes to mind). All of these men are better writers than I am, but I still prefer to read Nabokov. Could Nabokov have "made his point" in fewer words? Almost certainly, but I wouldn't have enjoyed them any more.
- grey-area 3y ago
  These rules are for students writing essays, not Nabokov.
  - martinjacobd 3y ago
    That makes sense. I clearly didn't read the paratext closely enough :)
- JackFr 3y ago
  The problem is most people aren’t Nabokov. (And Nabakov as a poet, translator of poems and expert on prosody was very, very good at writing fluidly - he could afford to be wordy.)
  - watwut 3y ago
    They are not Hemmingway either.
- fasterik 3y ago
  It's a lot more obvious in academic writing and other non-fiction. Using a lot of big words to make a simple point is often a sign that the writer is trying to signal intelligence rather than convey information. In literature the goals are different, but I still think the rule applies in most cases. Nabokov is the exception that proves the rule. Great writers have earned the right to be wordy. When an average writer tries write like Nabokov, we call it purple prose.
jay_kyburz 3y ago
I don't understand Sin Seven.
- kens 3y ago
  Number seven is miscellaneous issues; you need to click through to see them. One of the complaints is "treating data as singular". My view is that "data" is obviously a mass noun and treating it as plural is pointlessly pedantic.
  - jay_kyburz 3y ago
    Should be called The 6 Deadly Sins and a Myriad of Minor Mistakes.
    - louthy 3y ago
      Or, ‘The 6 Deadly Sins and Myriad Minor Mistakes’
Gunax 3y ago
My disappointment in my education is how much these rules were emphasized over content. The hard part of writing is content--not syntax. Just like programming is about logic, and syntax is a minor nitpick one needs to know. But I think the real reason these rules were emphasized so much is that they are easy to grade and explain.
- mistercheph 3y ago
  I agree with this, people seriously underestimate the degree to which minimum viable effort is the guiding principle of the education stack. Making students engaged in writing critically and creatively and communicatively is a much more difficult and poorly defined task than inventing or choosing at random (from style guides that have never been used by any impactful writers ever) rules of English grammar and style and then mechanistically applying them. This generates an exceedingly great amount of profit for the textbook writers and professional development folks that reinvent and retrain teachers in ad-hoc ineffective techniques every two years. Teachers, administrators, curriculum, textbook authors, school boards, edtech, local politicians, and students all conspiring to make education as mechanistic and unimpactful as possible because it satisfies the requirements of the world external to education while demanding the least possible effort and interest from all who participate. There are many, many exceptions of course, especially among the two classes that have a primary existence instead of a rent-seeking one (teachers and students), but this is the rule in the United States today.
- tylerhou 3y ago
  If you’ve ever read students’ writing, you’d immediately understand why these rules exist. Many students can’t get the basics down — and their writing is borderline illegible. How are they supposed to master content when they can’t master form?
  - arp242 3y ago
    I don't think these kind of rules are a good way to master form, either. The occasional mixing up of "its" and "it's" (or even "you're" and "your") really isn't the major problem; this rarely causes confusion or makes text flow bad. Even though it looks sloppy in professional writing, it's fine in a great many contexts. One of the so-called "illogical" examples is "Walking back from the village, my wallet was lost", because apparently "Does your wallet walk?", and the the "correct" is "Walking back from the village, I lost my wallet", which is basically the same sentence for everyone because no one was confused about a walking wallet in the first example (I personally don't like either by the way, and would write "I lost my wallet while walking back from the village"). Good writing is mainly about whether 1) text reads and "flows" fluidly, and 2) if it gets the point across. My main trick to get this right is to read things out loud in my head, but there are probably other ways, some of which may be better. It's certainly not about boring spelling details or personal preferences.
kazinator 3y ago
Sin 7: introducing a small number of categories each of which promises to cover one point, and sticking to the format until the last category, which is stuffed with 17 more independent points.
riwsky 3y ago
Sin 8: clichéd titles
- jraph 3y ago
  and bullet points?
mabbo 3y ago
> Passive voice produces a sentence in which the subject receives an action. In contrast, active voice produces a sentence in which the subject performs an action. Setting aside whether the passive or active voice is better, I'm delighted by this description of what each is.
- whiddershins 3y ago
  Woulda been awesome if the first sentence were written in passive voice.
  - jprete 3y ago
    Weak writing though. The sentences form a deliberate parallel structure, making it clear how the two voices differ.
- spartanatreyu 3y ago
  I can't grok "receives an action". What does "receives" mean? Looking at the example, I can only see that the active voice variations have: - The action after the subject - The action closer to the subject than the passive voice variation - The subject earlier in the sentence than the passive voice variation Can a sentence specifically be active or passive voice, or are active and passive on opposite ends of a spectrum where one sentence is said to be more active or more passive than another sentence?
  - a_bonobo 3y ago
    >Five people were shot in a police-related incident is a passive voice. The people receive the action. >A policeman shot five people today is active voice. The policeman shoots people. I use this particular example because it's a prime example of voice for the deflection of responsibility, see https://www.nber.org/papers/w30209 https://www.nber.org/papers/w30209
jrockway 3y ago
I like how one of the rules is basically about "its" and "it's". I think English made a big mistake by making this irregular; both forms should have been "it's". I hope it's issues are fixed in English v2. (You just read the first sentence in English v2!)
- PakG1 3y ago
  I presume this is a joke. Languages evolve over time (centuries in the case of English), there are very few examples of designed languages. English is especially complicated because it emerges from a melting pot of germanic, Latin, Greek, French, etc. The form of the word its emerged through a linguistic process that took a long, long time. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its# https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its#
  - paint 3y ago
    Yes, it was a joke.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  English is already on version 3 at least.
abathur 3y ago
Since it's a theme in more than one comment thread: If you're a contrarian, I'd soften rules to constraints. Their utility is less in what they do to your results than in what working within them does to you. Constraints force you to be attentive and mindful, and this helps you understand the tools, materials, and techniques at your disposal. It someone scolding you about passive voice is offputting, talk yourself into writing pair of stories or posts or journal entries in entirely passive and entirely active voice. Be fastidious about both. Learn your materials.
d-s 3y ago
Why the hell is passive voice so frowned up by Americans?
- taneq 3y ago
  I think you mean "Why the hell do Americans frown on passive voice?" ;) I blame the early MS Word grammar checker which always called out passive voice as poor style. :P I'd imagine it was written that way because passive voice was easy to detect, and corporate power posturing tended to paint passive voice as 'weak'. That said, passive voice is also associated with weasel wording and evasiveness, so if you're trying to communicate clearly and directly, it might not be the best way to phrase things.
- racktash 3y ago
  I suspect Elements of Style is at the root of "avoiding passive" being popular advice. It's a decent rule of thumb for those of us who accidentally slip into writing in the passive. Too much passive leads to writing that feels less direct, less active. Alas, as with every rule of thumb, you will get people who take it as a commandment and loudly denounce any and all use of passive, thinking they're being clever. I worked with a tech doc writer who liked to point out passive voice usage in peoples' work emails. Whatever gets you through life I guess...
dudeguy330111 3y ago
so an aspect of passive voice use is the difference between transitive and intransitve verbs. passive voice needs transitive verb use, a subject receives the action of a transitve verb, right? you cant use intransitive verbs with a passive voice
boxed 3y ago
The first sin is to throw an enormous popup in my face before showing the contents.
- bluenose69 3y ago
  Exactly. It took me 2 seconds to swear and close the site so I could read HN comments instead. This happens so much that I often just skip the original articles and go to the comments. HN is the only site where I do that.
hp6 3y ago
PASSIVE VOICE: Thomas Jefferson’s support of the new Constitution was documented in a letter to James Madison. ACTIVE VOICE: Thomas Jefferson documented his support of the new Constitution in a letter to James Madison. IMO the passive voice makes much more sence for this example.
- totetsu 3y ago
  a letter sent to James Madison documented Thomas Jefferson’s support of the new Constitution. ?
  - kbelder 3y ago
    Maybe documented sent letter a James Madison to Constitution the new of support Thomas Jefferson's ???
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Passive doesn't just sound better in the example, it's objectively correct. Jefferson wasn't attempting to document anything. That wasn't the action he was taking at all. We only consider it documented after the fact; it's completely incidental to what he was trying to accomplish. Therefor, only the passive voice describes what occurred. The only people actively documenting anything are those who deliberately set out to create documentation of events (and I think they might all be assholes, as a rule... so maybe he was actively documenting?).
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  It depends on whether Thomas Jeferson wrote the letter or someone else.
- watwut 3y ago
  Imo, the difference is in the focus. The passive voice version makes the "support of the new constitution" the most important thing the sentence is about. The active voice makes "Thomas Jefferson" the most important thing the sentence is about. So, it really depends on what the rest of the paragraph is supposed to be about.
2ICofafireteam 3y ago
Any Jerry Pournelle fans here? One thing he said was that to become a proficient writer, you needed to write enough to fill a steamer trunk and his view was that the trunk full of writing was not fit to publish and the biggest sin in writing was selling anything in that trunk after you became recognized as a writer because it was only accepted because of its provenance and not its quality.
Tomte 3y ago
Regarding the passive: you should read Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" that discusses where the passive voice is preferable to the active voice. Namely when it creates better cohesion and flow. The whole idea behind Williams' (and Gopen's and McEnerny's – they are all from the University of Chicago) style is that you should arrange your words so that they sit in the correct positions. Namely something old in the beginning of the sentence (paragraph, section...), something new in the end. Something important in the stress position. Something contextual in the topical position. Etc. The use of the passive is precisely that it lets you rearrange sentences so that certain parts go in "the other" position, that would be unnatural in an active construction, but that is correct in the logic of the sentence. This is practical style, by the way. Look up Thomas' and Turner's "Clear and simple as the truth" for a discussion of different styles and a tutorial in "classic style".
- segfaultbuserr 3y ago
  > Regarding the passive: you should read Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" that discusses where the passive voice is preferable to the active voice. Namely when it creates better cohesion and flow. Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
  - jraph 3y ago
pm3003 3y ago
I really like the "Pet Peeves" one. In English and other languages, I fight against what I call "adverbializing" by which I mean putting unnecessary adverbs and adverbial phrases everywhere, especially in speech; these include "equally", "in truth", "definitely", "veritably" (favourite word of an old boss of mine who thought it made him sound like an intellectual). I'm rather against the interdiction of the passive voice, or the interdiction of shifting the reader's point of view. While the passive voice can very quickly damage clarity, not every text should read like a to-do list. Different styles can be pertinent, just don't think writing in a complicated manner will make people want to read you.
taylorius 3y ago
A few thoughts. 1. Luckily this page isn't titled "Seven Sins of Webpage Design". 2. The sins are highly variable in their specificity and scope. They range from low level grammar problems (incorrect apostrophes) to "wordiness", which is far more abstract, and "in the eye of the beholder" 3. The last sin is a pointer to a list of other sins. In what sense is this "Seven Sins"? Feels shoehorned into a listicle (see point 1).
gushogg-blake 3y ago
The "treating data as singular" one is interesting - "data" as a plural is actually one of my biggest pet peeves because I strongly suspect that realising that it is technically the plural of "datum" is the only reason people started using it like that. The actual concept it conveys is almost always not a plural: it's more like "sand" than "pebbles".
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  In British English data is a collective singular.
  - andrew_mason1 3y ago
    The whole British English thing of "companies are plural nouns" (e.g. "Apple are creating a VR headset") simultaneously makes so much sense from how companies actually are (vs the American English that treats the company as a singular individual) and sounds completely wrong to me lol
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      British English usage would distinguish between the cases when the company as an entity in itself does something and when the people who comprise the company do something. Here Centrica is regarded as a singular: "It is the third time Centrica has upgraded its annual expectations this financial year," https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/british-gas-owner-forecasts-eightfold-rise-in-earnings-amid-soaring-gas-prices https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/british-gas...
- andrew_mason1 3y ago
  Exactly. And the fact that (probably) none of these people ever use the singular "datum" in writing makes the whole thing reek of gate-keeper-y "I am smart and you are not because I know a Latin thing". Also, every single time I see this "gripe" I am tempted (but don't because it helps nothing) to go "hmm, interesting you don't have the same issue with 'agenda'."
- 3y ago
nicbou 3y ago
Most writing is about giving people the information they want or need while respecting their time. In that sense, I find technical writing to be very close to UX design. If you want to write well, you must know your audience's needs and struggles. This is always left out of style guides, yet it's a core element of good writing. Clear writing is pointless if it clarifies the wrong things. It does not just require good writing skills, but also empathy and understanding.
rogual 3y ago
> PASSIVE VOICE: My first trip abroad is one I will always remember. This is the first time I've heard such a construction described as being in the passive voice by an authoritative source. Is it a mistake, or has the meaning of "passive voice" changed?
- d--b 3y ago
  It's a mistake. The passive voice of the sentence "I will always remember my first trip abroad" is "My first strip abroad will always be remembered by me".
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Yet another tip in the "person saying 'passive voice bad!' unable to actually identify it" jar then
  - everybodyknows 3y ago
    What is the proper term then for OP's construction? I note that both it and yours above introduce the verb "to be", though differently conjugated: "is" vs. "be".
    - d--b 3y ago
      It’s a standard active voice sentence. “that I will always remember” is a relative clause applying to “one”.
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  Arguably most eloquent, though now non-standard and a bit of a challenge to parse: "My first trip abroad I will always remember."
rwoerz 3y ago
Some sins of technical writing: Undefined/vague abstractions or methaphors: Leave the meaning of notoriously overloaded terms like component, plugin, container etc. unexplained in your specific context of writing. Homonyms: One term has several meanings. E.g., "server" is either a machine or a OS process. Synonyms: One meaning has several terms. E.g., "module" and "project" in Maven. No examples: Only rely on the reader ability to interpret pure abstractions instead of giving him/her examples to abstract from. E.g., provide only the EBNF of a certain language.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  One that annoys me is when authors use multiple different terms for the same thing. In fiction, variety can be excellent, but in technical writing, it really adds to the readers' workload. I remember reviewing a doc where, depending on which section you were reading, the terms 'design', 'architecture' 'system' and IIRC 'component framework' were used interchangeably. This made following the reasoning hard because the doc was itself a review of two distinct technical solutions. This often happens when a doc has multiple authors and no global consistency checking.
tetrep 3y ago
It's missing "Webster's dictionary defines The Seven Sins of writing as...."

129 points by paint 3y ago

“Avoid the passive voice” is a rule that annoys me. Sometimes, the rule that’s annoying is more important than the person that’s being annoyed.

version_five 3y ago
There should be an (n+1)th rule for these lists that's break the rules when you want, just know you're breaking them and do it because you like the result better, not out of sloppiness.
- smilespray 3y ago
  My teachers told me this is true for almost all lists of rules. YMMV.
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    Rules (which don’t involve courts & prisons) are just shorthand for reasons. The better you understand the reasons behind the rules, the easier it will be to know when to break them. Or, in an artistic sense, how best to dramatically or subtly break them in service to some creative perspective. Any of them! All of them! This is as true in architecture, rocket design, fashion and etiquette, as it is in prose. —- And this is why organizations that impose process without delegating and encouraging an organization-wide agency to make intentional exceptions, smother innovation so effectively. They lose most of their creative and adaptive abilities.
screamingninja 3y ago
> a rule that annoys me None of these are meant to be "rules" in my understanding. The post starts with "In most instances", so it leaves plenty of room for "exceptions" to the list based on what you intend to convey.
enkid 3y ago
The problem is that most people who say this don't know what the passive voice means. What they want to say is make the most important noun in the sentence the subject and keep the subject near the beginning of the sentence. That concept is only tangentially related to the grammatical voice being used.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Sometimes passive voice is the best way to do that though, because the subject of the action is more important (e.g. the target of a shooting rather than the shooter). Using active voice would either put the important person at the end, or might require you to find an alternative verb with reversed arguments, resulting in more awkward phrasing
  - enkid 3y ago
    Yes, passive voice is used effectively all the time. The rule was created by grammarian's who didn't understand its effectiveness or overstated its necessity. Judgement should be used to determine when it works.

msla 3y ago

Be clear about what the passive voice is: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 > It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; that The case took on racial overtones is in the passive; that Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened is in the passive; and so on. (Needless to say, none of those are in the passive voice. Of course, some people think questions are in the passive voice, so perhaps this education is a lost cause.) Moving on: > Concise writing is key to clear communication. Wordiness obscures your ideas and frustrates your reader. Make your points succinctly. The funny thing is, they wrote this without intending to be ironic. Finally: > Each student must meet with their advisor. They mark this as incorrect, which it is not, and which marks them as being innovative and ignorant. Innovative, in that they're trying to invent new rules for English to follow, and ignorant, in that they think they're being traditionalists. Cites: https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/singular-they-history https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/singular-they-history > The plural they originated around the 13th century, and it didn’t take long for its singular form to emerge. As professor and linguist Dennis Baron writes in a post at the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known instance of the singular they can be found in the medieval poem William and the Werewolf from 1375. A section translated from the Middle English to modern English reads, “Each man hurried [. . .] till they drew near [. . .] where William and his darling were lying together.” Because most language changes develop orally before they’re written down, this form of they likely had been in use for years by this point. https://web.archive.org/web/20200121102050/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/books/review/whats-your-pronoun-dennis-baron.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200121102050/https://www.nytim... https://archive.ph/jnODV https://archive.ph/jnODV > For the still unpersuaded, he points out that singular “they” is older than singular “you.” Only in the 1600s did singular “you” start pushing out “thou” and “thee.” Finally, this: > Each student must meet his or her advisor. Is marked as correct, but it isn't. Some people don't identify as "He" or "She" and trying to "Grammar" them into submission is simply idiotic.

racktash 3y ago
I was surprised when reading The Sense of Style by Pinker (not a book I would recommend incidentally) that the use of 'they' as a generic pronoun was still considered controversial. Pinker opts to alternate his chapters with he, then she, then he again – he explains this is to avoid the issue of having to otherwise use he/she type constructs. Had he used 'they', I would've never thought anything of it. Maybe it's a geographical thing?

cebert 3y ago

I’ve always seen recommendations to avoid passive voice in writing. However, when I encounter passive voice it doesn’t bother me. It also is one of my more frequent writing mistakes. Is this still considered bad practice?

thfuran 3y ago
As a general rule, yes.
creata 3y ago
Yes. Some people (especially when they're trying to sound formal or impartial) use the passive voice way too much.
PakG1 3y ago
The interesting question is if passive voice is so bad, how did it come about in the English language and why did it survive? That directly contradicts a lot of this advice. Though I try to use primarily active voice because it helps me save on word/page count when I'm trying to submit papers to conferences.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  Passive voice in itself is benign. It provides flexibility, and it lets you emphasize the target of an action, or the action itself over the do-er, if that fits your intent. Advice to avoid passive voice comes from a variety of reasons, but perhaps the most charitable (and I think useful) view would be: * In technical writing, you might have pick up passive voice because of misguided advice to use avoid "I" and "we". This naturally leads you to using passive voice all over the place. This makes the writing "seem more objective", but is really just the veneer of objectivity. And in some ways is the polar opposite of the advice to always avoid passive voice. English has both voices - use them both. If nothing else (and all other things were equal), active voice tends to be more concise - as you have noted - which is a true benefit for technical writing. * Passive voice is one of tools employed when weaseling or obfuscating (see the infamous "mistakes were made"). Advice to avoid the passive voice is either nudging you to either... just be more honest (don't weasel!), or to be more clever in your weaseling (because everyone knows the trick...) * Because use of passive voice in more mundane/banal communication is so common (or seemingly so common), there was a perception that people were just defaulting in the passive because that's what government officials, or companies or whatever talked like. And so the advice was pushback. Reminding you that you don't have to speak or write like a prepared government speech or press release.

martinjacobd 3y ago

I wish I understood what "wordiness" means. Perhaps it's restating the same simple point three times in as many loose sentences. People who harp on this point usually point to the writing of Hemingway and similar writers (Carver comes to mind). All of these men are better writers than I am, but I still prefer to read Nabokov. Could Nabokov have "made his point" in fewer words? Almost certainly, but I wouldn't have enjoyed them any more.

grey-area 3y ago
These rules are for students writing essays, not Nabokov.
- martinjacobd 3y ago
  That makes sense. I clearly didn't read the paratext closely enough :)
JackFr 3y ago
The problem is most people aren’t Nabokov. (And Nabakov as a poet, translator of poems and expert on prosody was very, very good at writing fluidly - he could afford to be wordy.)
- watwut 3y ago
  They are not Hemmingway either.
fasterik 3y ago
It's a lot more obvious in academic writing and other non-fiction. Using a lot of big words to make a simple point is often a sign that the writer is trying to signal intelligence rather than convey information. In literature the goals are different, but I still think the rule applies in most cases. Nabokov is the exception that proves the rule. Great writers have earned the right to be wordy. When an average writer tries write like Nabokov, we call it purple prose.

jay_kyburz 3y ago

I don't understand Sin Seven.

kens 3y ago
Number seven is miscellaneous issues; you need to click through to see them. One of the complaints is "treating data as singular". My view is that "data" is obviously a mass noun and treating it as plural is pointlessly pedantic.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Should be called The 6 Deadly Sins and a Myriad of Minor Mistakes.
  - louthy 3y ago
    Or, ‘The 6 Deadly Sins and Myriad Minor Mistakes’

Gunax 3y ago

My disappointment in my education is how much these rules were emphasized over content. The hard part of writing is content--not syntax. Just like programming is about logic, and syntax is a minor nitpick one needs to know. But I think the real reason these rules were emphasized so much is that they are easy to grade and explain.

mistercheph 3y ago
I agree with this, people seriously underestimate the degree to which minimum viable effort is the guiding principle of the education stack. Making students engaged in writing critically and creatively and communicatively is a much more difficult and poorly defined task than inventing or choosing at random (from style guides that have never been used by any impactful writers ever) rules of English grammar and style and then mechanistically applying them. This generates an exceedingly great amount of profit for the textbook writers and professional development folks that reinvent and retrain teachers in ad-hoc ineffective techniques every two years. Teachers, administrators, curriculum, textbook authors, school boards, edtech, local politicians, and students all conspiring to make education as mechanistic and unimpactful as possible because it satisfies the requirements of the world external to education while demanding the least possible effort and interest from all who participate. There are many, many exceptions of course, especially among the two classes that have a primary existence instead of a rent-seeking one (teachers and students), but this is the rule in the United States today.
tylerhou 3y ago
If you’ve ever read students’ writing, you’d immediately understand why these rules exist. Many students can’t get the basics down — and their writing is borderline illegible. How are they supposed to master content when they can’t master form?
- arp242 3y ago
  I don't think these kind of rules are a good way to master form, either. The occasional mixing up of "its" and "it's" (or even "you're" and "your") really isn't the major problem; this rarely causes confusion or makes text flow bad. Even though it looks sloppy in professional writing, it's fine in a great many contexts. One of the so-called "illogical" examples is "Walking back from the village, my wallet was lost", because apparently "Does your wallet walk?", and the the "correct" is "Walking back from the village, I lost my wallet", which is basically the same sentence for everyone because no one was confused about a walking wallet in the first example (I personally don't like either by the way, and would write "I lost my wallet while walking back from the village"). Good writing is mainly about whether 1) text reads and "flows" fluidly, and 2) if it gets the point across. My main trick to get this right is to read things out loud in my head, but there are probably other ways, some of which may be better. It's certainly not about boring spelling details or personal preferences.

kazinator 3y ago

Sin 7: introducing a small number of categories each of which promises to cover one point, and sticking to the format until the last category, which is stuffed with 17 more independent points.

riwsky 3y ago

Sin 8: clichéd titles

jraph 3y ago
and bullet points?

mabbo 3y ago

> Passive voice produces a sentence in which the subject receives an action. In contrast, active voice produces a sentence in which the subject performs an action. Setting aside whether the passive or active voice is better, I'm delighted by this description of what each is.

whiddershins 3y ago
Woulda been awesome if the first sentence were written in passive voice.
- jprete 3y ago
  Weak writing though. The sentences form a deliberate parallel structure, making it clear how the two voices differ.
spartanatreyu 3y ago
I can't grok "receives an action". What does "receives" mean? Looking at the example, I can only see that the active voice variations have: - The action after the subject - The action closer to the subject than the passive voice variation - The subject earlier in the sentence than the passive voice variation Can a sentence specifically be active or passive voice, or are active and passive on opposite ends of a spectrum where one sentence is said to be more active or more passive than another sentence?
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  >Five people were shot in a police-related incident is a passive voice. The people receive the action. >A policeman shot five people today is active voice. The policeman shoots people. I use this particular example because it's a prime example of voice for the deflection of responsibility, see https://www.nber.org/papers/w30209 https://www.nber.org/papers/w30209

jrockway 3y ago

I like how one of the rules is basically about "its" and "it's". I think English made a big mistake by making this irregular; both forms should have been "it's". I hope it's issues are fixed in English v2. (You just read the first sentence in English v2!)

PakG1 3y ago
I presume this is a joke. Languages evolve over time (centuries in the case of English), there are very few examples of designed languages. English is especially complicated because it emerges from a melting pot of germanic, Latin, Greek, French, etc. The form of the word its emerged through a linguistic process that took a long, long time. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its# https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its#
- paint 3y ago
  Yes, it was a joke.
theandrewbailey 3y ago
English is already on version 3 at least.

abathur 3y ago

Since it's a theme in more than one comment thread: If you're a contrarian, I'd soften rules to constraints. Their utility is less in what they do to your results than in what working within them does to you. Constraints force you to be attentive and mindful, and this helps you understand the tools, materials, and techniques at your disposal. It someone scolding you about passive voice is offputting, talk yourself into writing pair of stories or posts or journal entries in entirely passive and entirely active voice. Be fastidious about both. Learn your materials.

d-s 3y ago

Why the hell is passive voice so frowned up by Americans?

taneq 3y ago
I think you mean "Why the hell do Americans frown on passive voice?" ;) I blame the early MS Word grammar checker which always called out passive voice as poor style. :P I'd imagine it was written that way because passive voice was easy to detect, and corporate power posturing tended to paint passive voice as 'weak'. That said, passive voice is also associated with weasel wording and evasiveness, so if you're trying to communicate clearly and directly, it might not be the best way to phrase things.
racktash 3y ago
I suspect Elements of Style is at the root of "avoiding passive" being popular advice. It's a decent rule of thumb for those of us who accidentally slip into writing in the passive. Too much passive leads to writing that feels less direct, less active. Alas, as with every rule of thumb, you will get people who take it as a commandment and loudly denounce any and all use of passive, thinking they're being clever. I worked with a tech doc writer who liked to point out passive voice usage in peoples' work emails. Whatever gets you through life I guess...

dudeguy330111 3y ago

so an aspect of passive voice use is the difference between transitive and intransitve verbs. passive voice needs transitive verb use, a subject receives the action of a transitve verb, right? you cant use intransitive verbs with a passive voice

boxed 3y ago

The first sin is to throw an enormous popup in my face before showing the contents.

bluenose69 3y ago
Exactly. It took me 2 seconds to swear and close the site so I could read HN comments instead. This happens so much that I often just skip the original articles and go to the comments. HN is the only site where I do that.

hp6 3y ago

PASSIVE VOICE: Thomas Jefferson’s support of the new Constitution was documented in a letter to James Madison. ACTIVE VOICE: Thomas Jefferson documented his support of the new Constitution in a letter to James Madison. IMO the passive voice makes much more sence for this example.

totetsu 3y ago
a letter sent to James Madison documented Thomas Jefferson’s support of the new Constitution. ?
- kbelder 3y ago
  Maybe documented sent letter a James Madison to Constitution the new of support Thomas Jefferson's ???
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Passive doesn't just sound better in the example, it's objectively correct. Jefferson wasn't attempting to document anything. That wasn't the action he was taking at all. We only consider it documented after the fact; it's completely incidental to what he was trying to accomplish. Therefor, only the passive voice describes what occurred. The only people actively documenting anything are those who deliberately set out to create documentation of events (and I think they might all be assholes, as a rule... so maybe he was actively documenting?).
zelphirkalt 3y ago
It depends on whether Thomas Jeferson wrote the letter or someone else.
watwut 3y ago
Imo, the difference is in the focus. The passive voice version makes the "support of the new constitution" the most important thing the sentence is about. The active voice makes "Thomas Jefferson" the most important thing the sentence is about. So, it really depends on what the rest of the paragraph is supposed to be about.

2ICofafireteam 3y ago

Any Jerry Pournelle fans here? One thing he said was that to become a proficient writer, you needed to write enough to fill a steamer trunk and his view was that the trunk full of writing was not fit to publish and the biggest sin in writing was selling anything in that trunk after you became recognized as a writer because it was only accepted because of its provenance and not its quality.

Tomte 3y ago

Regarding the passive: you should read Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" that discusses where the passive voice is preferable to the active voice. Namely when it creates better cohesion and flow. The whole idea behind Williams' (and Gopen's and McEnerny's – they are all from the University of Chicago) style is that you should arrange your words so that they sit in the correct positions. Namely something old in the beginning of the sentence (paragraph, section...), something new in the end. Something important in the stress position. Something contextual in the topical position. Etc. The use of the passive is precisely that it lets you rearrange sentences so that certain parts go in "the other" position, that would be unnatural in an active construction, but that is correct in the logic of the sentence. This is practical style, by the way. Look up Thomas' and Turner's "Clear and simple as the truth" for a discussion of different styles and a tutorial in "classic style".

segfaultbuserr 3y ago
> Regarding the passive: you should read Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" that discusses where the passive voice is preferable to the active voice. Namely when it creates better cohesion and flow. Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
- jraph 3y ago

pm3003 3y ago

I really like the "Pet Peeves" one. In English and other languages, I fight against what I call "adverbializing" by which I mean putting unnecessary adverbs and adverbial phrases everywhere, especially in speech; these include "equally", "in truth", "definitely", "veritably" (favourite word of an old boss of mine who thought it made him sound like an intellectual). I'm rather against the interdiction of the passive voice, or the interdiction of shifting the reader's point of view. While the passive voice can very quickly damage clarity, not every text should read like a to-do list. Different styles can be pertinent, just don't think writing in a complicated manner will make people want to read you.

taylorius 3y ago

A few thoughts. 1. Luckily this page isn't titled "Seven Sins of Webpage Design". 2. The sins are highly variable in their specificity and scope. They range from low level grammar problems (incorrect apostrophes) to "wordiness", which is far more abstract, and "in the eye of the beholder" 3. The last sin is a pointer to a list of other sins. In what sense is this "Seven Sins"? Feels shoehorned into a listicle (see point 1).

gushogg-blake 3y ago

The "treating data as singular" one is interesting - "data" as a plural is actually one of my biggest pet peeves because I strongly suspect that realising that it is technically the plural of "datum" is the only reason people started using it like that. The actual concept it conveys is almost always not a plural: it's more like "sand" than "pebbles".

kwhitefoot 3y ago
In British English data is a collective singular.
- andrew_mason1 3y ago
  The whole British English thing of "companies are plural nouns" (e.g. "Apple are creating a VR headset") simultaneously makes so much sense from how companies actually are (vs the American English that treats the company as a singular individual) and sounds completely wrong to me lol
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    British English usage would distinguish between the cases when the company as an entity in itself does something and when the people who comprise the company do something. Here Centrica is regarded as a singular: "It is the third time Centrica has upgraded its annual expectations this financial year," https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/british-gas-owner-forecasts-eightfold-rise-in-earnings-amid-soaring-gas-prices https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/british-gas...
andrew_mason1 3y ago
Exactly. And the fact that (probably) none of these people ever use the singular "datum" in writing makes the whole thing reek of gate-keeper-y "I am smart and you are not because I know a Latin thing". Also, every single time I see this "gripe" I am tempted (but don't because it helps nothing) to go "hmm, interesting you don't have the same issue with 'agenda'."
3y ago

nicbou 3y ago

Most writing is about giving people the information they want or need while respecting their time. In that sense, I find technical writing to be very close to UX design. If you want to write well, you must know your audience's needs and struggles. This is always left out of style guides, yet it's a core element of good writing. Clear writing is pointless if it clarifies the wrong things. It does not just require good writing skills, but also empathy and understanding.

rogual 3y ago

> PASSIVE VOICE: My first trip abroad is one I will always remember. This is the first time I've heard such a construction described as being in the passive voice by an authoritative source. Is it a mistake, or has the meaning of "passive voice" changed?

d--b 3y ago
It's a mistake. The passive voice of the sentence "I will always remember my first trip abroad" is "My first strip abroad will always be remembered by me".
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Yet another tip in the "person saying 'passive voice bad!' unable to actually identify it" jar then
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  What is the proper term then for OP's construction? I note that both it and yours above introduce the verb "to be", though differently conjugated: "is" vs. "be".
  - d--b 3y ago
    It’s a standard active voice sentence. “that I will always remember” is a relative clause applying to “one”.
everybodyknows 3y ago
Arguably most eloquent, though now non-standard and a bit of a challenge to parse: "My first trip abroad I will always remember."

rwoerz 3y ago

Some sins of technical writing: Undefined/vague abstractions or methaphors: Leave the meaning of notoriously overloaded terms like component, plugin, container etc. unexplained in your specific context of writing. Homonyms: One term has several meanings. E.g., "server" is either a machine or a OS process. Synonyms: One meaning has several terms. E.g., "module" and "project" in Maven. No examples: Only rely on the reader ability to interpret pure abstractions instead of giving him/her examples to abstract from. E.g., provide only the EBNF of a certain language.

KineticLensman 3y ago
One that annoys me is when authors use multiple different terms for the same thing. In fiction, variety can be excellent, but in technical writing, it really adds to the readers' workload. I remember reviewing a doc where, depending on which section you were reading, the terms 'design', 'architecture' 'system' and IIRC 'component framework' were used interchangeably. This made following the reasoning hard because the doc was itself a review of two distinct technical solutions. This often happens when a doc has multiple authors and no global consistency checking.

tetrep 3y ago

It's missing "Webster's dictionary defines The Seven Sins of writing as...."