6 ms·

What's wrong with passive?

kragen 1y ago
Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)
- Rayhem 1y ago
  > Sometimes authors use it without thinking, but removing the passive voice often makes writing shorter and clearer. I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.
  - kragen 1y ago
    I agree that it's a perfectly fine way to say it in the active voice, but I think it makes the sentence read slightly worse and require slightly more effort to understand. Certainly it's slightly longer. Possibly it depends on the reader; the passive voice seems to be more of an obstacle for Spanish-as-a-first-language speakers, for example, than for native English speakers.
plemer 1y ago
Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something. Examples: * Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal. * Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. * Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?] Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes approval. - edited for clarity, detail
- kragen 1y ago
  Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers. Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    E-Prime is cool. OOPS! I mean E-Prime cools me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're, there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's, what's, and that's. Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.
    - kragen 1y ago
      I've had entire conversations in E-Prime. I found it an interestingly brain-twisting exercise, but still managed to smuggle in all kinds of covert presumptions of equivalence and essential (or analytic) attributes, even though E-Prime's designers intended it to force you to question such things.
      - plemer 1y ago
        Would you mind identifying a few of the "smuggled presumptions"?
bityard 1y ago
In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.
- kragen 1y ago
  I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it. Consider: > Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like: > Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure. This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters. Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory. (Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.) Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes: > For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse: > For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come. This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.
  - joshmarinacci 1y ago
    I think what you were saying is that it depends entirely on the type of writing you’re doing and who your audience is.
arscan 1y ago
There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.
- PlunderBunny 1y ago
  Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?) that allowed the type of document to be specified, and setting that to ‘scientific paper’ allowed passive voice to be written without being flagged as an error.
- Xorakios 1y ago
  had to giggle because Microsoft hadn't yet been founded when I was in high school!
jcranmer 1y ago
There's nothing wrong with the passive voice. The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place. I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.
- suzzer99 1y ago
  Active is generally more concise and engages the reader more. Of course there are exceptions, like everything. Internet posts have a very different style standard than a book.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.
  - kragen 1y ago
    What would it mean to use the passive voice on a finite verb?
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      It would mean that somewhere in your sentence there's a clause headed by a passive verb. A finite verb is one that heads a clause. This terminology is where we get the name of the "infinitive" form from, by the way. As a rule of thumb, the nonfinite forms of a verb are its infinitives and participles. jcranmer used a passive participle, but all of his clauses are active. Unnoticed doesn't have a clause around it. (He might have thought that go unnoticed is a passive form, perhaps of the verb notice (?), in which case that would just be an error.)
hathawsh 1y ago
Here is a simple summary of the common voices/moods in technical writing: - Active: The user presses the Enter key. - Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed. - Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key. The imperative mood is concise and doesn't dance around questions about who's doing what. The reader is expected to do it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
KineticLensman 1y ago
Passive can be disastrous when used in contractual situations if the agent who should be responsible for an action isn’t identified. E.g. “X will be done”. I was once burnt by a contract that in some places left it unclear whether the customer or the contractor was responsible for particular tasks. Active voice that identifies the agent is less ambiguous
- kragen 1y ago
  This is an excellent point, and one I haven't seen raised before.
AdrianB1 1y ago
Passive is too human. We need robot-styles communications, next step is to send json.
Tainnor 1y ago
absolutely nothing, except that some pencil-pushers with poor understanding of grammar somehow dislike it even though they often can't even identify it correctly. Language log has been writing about this for so long it's not even funny: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54 Although the best place to start is probably here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922

Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)

Rayhem 1y ago
> Sometimes authors use it without thinking, but removing the passive voice often makes writing shorter and clearer. I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.
- kragen 1y ago
  I agree that it's a perfectly fine way to say it in the active voice, but I think it makes the sentence read slightly worse and require slightly more effort to understand. Certainly it's slightly longer. Possibly it depends on the reader; the passive voice seems to be more of an obstacle for Spanish-as-a-first-language speakers, for example, than for native English speakers.

plemer 1y ago

Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something. Examples: * Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal. * Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. * Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?] Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes approval. - edited for clarity, detail

kragen 1y ago
Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers. Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  E-Prime is cool. OOPS! I mean E-Prime cools me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're, there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's, what's, and that's. Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.
  - kragen 1y ago
    I've had entire conversations in E-Prime. I found it an interestingly brain-twisting exercise, but still managed to smuggle in all kinds of covert presumptions of equivalence and essential (or analytic) attributes, even though E-Prime's designers intended it to force you to question such things.
    - plemer 1y ago
      Would you mind identifying a few of the "smuggled presumptions"?

bityard 1y ago

In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.

kragen 1y ago
I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it. Consider: > Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like: > Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure. This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters. Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory. (Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.) Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes: > For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse: > For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come. This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.
- joshmarinacci 1y ago
  I think what you were saying is that it depends entirely on the type of writing you’re doing and who your audience is.

arscan 1y ago

There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.

PlunderBunny 1y ago
Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?) that allowed the type of document to be specified, and setting that to ‘scientific paper’ allowed passive voice to be written without being flagged as an error.
Xorakios 1y ago
had to giggle because Microsoft hadn't yet been founded when I was in high school!

jcranmer 1y ago

There's nothing wrong with the passive voice. The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place. I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.

suzzer99 1y ago
Active is generally more concise and engages the reader more. Of course there are exceptions, like everything. Internet posts have a very different style standard than a book.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.
- kragen 1y ago
  What would it mean to use the passive voice on a finite verb?
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    It would mean that somewhere in your sentence there's a clause headed by a passive verb. A finite verb is one that heads a clause. This terminology is where we get the name of the "infinitive" form from, by the way. As a rule of thumb, the nonfinite forms of a verb are its infinitives and participles. jcranmer used a passive participle, but all of his clauses are active. Unnoticed doesn't have a clause around it. (He might have thought that go unnoticed is a passive form, perhaps of the verb notice (?), in which case that would just be an error.)

hathawsh 1y ago

Here is a simple summary of the common voices/moods in technical writing: - Active: The user presses the Enter key. - Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed. - Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key. The imperative mood is concise and doesn't dance around questions about who's doing what. The reader is expected to do it.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

KineticLensman 1y ago

Passive can be disastrous when used in contractual situations if the agent who should be responsible for an action isn’t identified. E.g. “X will be done”. I was once burnt by a contract that in some places left it unclear whether the customer or the contractor was responsible for particular tasks. Active voice that identifies the agent is less ambiguous

kragen 1y ago
This is an excellent point, and one I haven't seen raised before.

AdrianB1 1y ago

Passive is too human. We need robot-styles communications, next step is to send json.

Tainnor 1y ago

absolutely nothing, except that some pencil-pushers with poor understanding of grammar somehow dislike it even though they often can't even identify it correctly. Language log has been writing about this for so long it's not even funny: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54 Although the best place to start is probably here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922