6 ms·

Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something. Examples: * Active - concise, complete info: The manag

by 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"?
      - kragen 1y ago
        Well, I had those conversations a long time ago, but we can describe some general patterns. We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly language as follows: I smuggled in presumptions of attributes. The presumptions were covert. The attributes were essential. it would clearly violate E-Prime. And that forces you to ask: does he intend "covert" to represent an essential attribute of those presumptions, or merely a temporary or circumstantial state relative to a particular temporal context? Did he intend "essential" to limit the subjects of discourse to only certain attributes (the essential ones rather than the accidental ones), and within what scope do those attributes have this purported essentiality? Universally, in every possible world, or only within the confines of a particular discourse? In these particular cases, though, I smuggled in no such presumptions! Both adjectives merely delimit the topic of discourse, to clarify that it does not pertain to overt presumptions or to presumptions of accidental attributes. (As I understand it, Korzybski objects to the "is of predication" not because no predicates exist objectively, but because he doubts the essentiality of any predicates.) But you can use precisely the same structure to much more nefarious rhetorical ends. Consider, "Chávez kicked the squalid capitalists out of the country." Well, he kicked out all the capitalists! We've smuggled in a covert presumption of essentiality, implying that capitalism entails squalidity. And E-Prime's prohibition on the copula did not protect us at all. If anything, we lose much rhetorical force if we have to explicitly assert their squalidity, using an explicit statement that invites contradiction: The capitalists are squalid. We find another weak point at alternative linking verbs. It clearly violates E-Prime to say, "Your mother's face is uglier than a hand grenade," and rightly so, because it projects the speaker's subjective perceptions out onto the world. Korzybski (or Bourland) would prefer that we say, for example, "Your mother's face looks uglier to me than a hand grenade," or possibly, "I see your mother's face as uglier than a hand grenade," thus relativizing the attribute to a single speaker's perception. (He advocated clarity of thought, not civility.) But we can cheat in a variety of ways that still smuggle in that judgment of essentiality! Your mother's face turned uglier than a hand grenade. We can argue this one. Maybe tomorrow, or after her plastic surgery, it will turn pretty again, rather than having ugliness as an essential attribute. Your mother's face became uglier than a hand grenade. This goes a little bit further down the line; "became" presupposes a sort of transformation of essence rather than a mere change of state. And English has a variety of verbs that we can use like that. For example, "find", as in "Alsup found Dahmer guilty." Although in that case "find" asserts a state (presumably Dahmer became guilty at some specific time in the past), we can also use it for essential attributes: I find your mother's face uglier than a hand grenade. Or lie, more or less, about the agent or speaker: Your mother's face finds itself uglier than a hand grenade. And of course we can retreat to attributive adjectives again: Your mother has a face uglier than a hand grenade. Your mother comes with an uglier face than a hand grenade. Or we can simply omit the prepositional phrase from the statement of subjective perception, thus completely erasing the real agent: Your mother's face looks uglier [...] than a hand grenade. Korzybski didn't care about the passive voice much, though; E-Prime makes it more difficult but, mostly, not intentionally. As an exception, erasing the agent through the passive voice can misrepresent the speaker's subjective perception as objective: Your mother's face is found uglier than a hand grenade. But that still works if we use any of the alternative, E-Prime-permitted passive-voice auxiliary verbs: Your mother's face gets found uglier than a hand grenade. As Bourland said, I have "transform[ed] [my] opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things". As another example, notice all the times I've used "as" here. Many of these times smuggle in a covert assertion of essential attributes or even of identity! But I found it very interesting to notice these things when E-Prime forced me to rethink how I would say them with the copula. It seems like just the kind of mental exercise to heighten my attention to implicit assumptions of identity and essentiality that Korzybski intended. I wrote the above in E-Prime, by the way. Just for fun.
- brookst 1y ago
  Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - kragen 1y ago
    That doesn't make sense. It's like saying that the best general advice about which way to turn when you're driving is to turn right. From your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308, and from the fact that you used the passive voice in your comment ("they should be avoided") apparently without noticing, it appears that the reason you have this opinion is that you don't know what the passive voice is in the first place.
    - CrazyStat 1y ago
      I can’t find it, but I remember reading an article a year or two ago with an analysis showing some of the most vocal critics of the passive voice used the passive voice more often than most of their contemporary writers.
      - kragen 1y ago
        Probably http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.h..., giving specific statistics on Orwell and on Strunk & White, linked from https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.
        CrazyStat 1y ago
        Thank you!
        1y ago
Veen 1y ago
I always like to share this when the passive voice comes up: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBkGG3BC6dk&si=24Zrw1e8GSEZR7cG https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBk...
- kragen 1y ago
  Pullum is fantastic, thanks! I didn't know he'd recorded video lectures on this topic.
exe34 1y ago
My favourite: "a decision was made to...". It means "I decided to do this, but I don't have the balls to admit it."
- IggleSniggle 1y ago
  That's funny, I always thought that meant, "my superior told me I had to do this obviously stupid thing but I'm not going to say my superior was the one who decided this obviously stupid thing." Only occasionally, that is said in a tongue-and-cheek way to refer directly to the speaker as the "superior in charge of the decision."
  - dylan604 1y ago
    That reads like several comments I've left in code when I've been told to do something very obviously dumb, but did not want to get tagged with the "why was it done this way?" by the next person reading the code
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    You’re both right; I’ve seen it used both ways.
- horsawlarway 1y ago
  That's funny because I read this entirely differently (somewhat dependent on context) "A decision was made to..." is often code for "The current author didn't agree with [the decision that was made] but it was outside their ability to influence" Often because they were overruled by a superior, or outvoted by peers.
- Boldened15 1y ago
  Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware. Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity. Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.
coliveira 1y ago
Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  The subject can also be the feature itself. active/passive: - The Manage User menu item changes a user's status from active to inactive. - A user's status is changed from active to inactive using the Manage User menu item.
  - normie3000 1y ago
    Object-orientated vs subject-orientated?
    - trealira 1y ago
      The passive voice just switches the roles so that the patient is the subject and the agent is the object (e.g. in "The ball was kicked by John," the ball is still the patient despite being the subject). It's just that with English word order, it also switches the places of the things in the sentence. In languages with more flexible word order, you could just switch the two without passive voice. You could just say the equivalent of "The ball kicked John," with it being clear somehow that the ball is the grammatical object and John the subject, without needing to use the passive voice at all.
      - kragen 1y ago
        While that's true, many of those languages with more flexible word order, such as classical Greek and classical Latin, also have the passive voice. Classical Greek even has a third voice called the "middle voice".
        trealira 1y ago
dylan604 1y ago
> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?
- badlibrarian 1y ago
  29% overhead (two of seven words) adds up.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    great, someone can do math, but it is not awkward nor wordy.
    - badlibrarian 1y ago
      It's wordy to a high school teacher. Like using "nor" incorrectly it will cause some people's brows to furrow. Always best to be aware of the rules you choose to break.
  - suzzer99 1y ago
    I reduced my manuscript by 2,000 words with Grammarly. At 500 pages, anything I could do to trim it down is a big plus.
ipaddr 1y ago
#2 Is the most pleasant form. The proposal being approved is the most important. #1 Tries to make the manager approving more important then the approval.

by plemer 1y ago

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"?
    - kragen 1y ago
      Well, I had those conversations a long time ago, but we can describe some general patterns. We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly language as follows: I smuggled in presumptions of attributes. The presumptions were covert. The attributes were essential. it would clearly violate E-Prime. And that forces you to ask: does he intend "covert" to represent an essential attribute of those presumptions, or merely a temporary or circumstantial state relative to a particular temporal context? Did he intend "essential" to limit the subjects of discourse to only certain attributes (the essential ones rather than the accidental ones), and within what scope do those attributes have this purported essentiality? Universally, in every possible world, or only within the confines of a particular discourse? In these particular cases, though, I smuggled in no such presumptions! Both adjectives merely delimit the topic of discourse, to clarify that it does not pertain to overt presumptions or to presumptions of accidental attributes. (As I understand it, Korzybski objects to the "is of predication" not because no predicates exist objectively, but because he doubts the essentiality of any predicates.) But you can use precisely the same structure to much more nefarious rhetorical ends. Consider, "Chávez kicked the squalid capitalists out of the country." Well, he kicked out all the capitalists! We've smuggled in a covert presumption of essentiality, implying that capitalism entails squalidity. And E-Prime's prohibition on the copula did not protect us at all. If anything, we lose much rhetorical force if we have to explicitly assert their squalidity, using an explicit statement that invites contradiction: The capitalists are squalid. We find another weak point at alternative linking verbs. It clearly violates E-Prime to say, "Your mother's face is uglier than a hand grenade," and rightly so, because it projects the speaker's subjective perceptions out onto the world. Korzybski (or Bourland) would prefer that we say, for example, "Your mother's face looks uglier to me than a hand grenade," or possibly, "I see your mother's face as uglier than a hand grenade," thus relativizing the attribute to a single speaker's perception. (He advocated clarity of thought, not civility.) But we can cheat in a variety of ways that still smuggle in that judgment of essentiality! Your mother's face turned uglier than a hand grenade. We can argue this one. Maybe tomorrow, or after her plastic surgery, it will turn pretty again, rather than having ugliness as an essential attribute. Your mother's face became uglier than a hand grenade. This goes a little bit further down the line; "became" presupposes a sort of transformation of essence rather than a mere change of state. And English has a variety of verbs that we can use like that. For example, "find", as in "Alsup found Dahmer guilty." Although in that case "find" asserts a state (presumably Dahmer became guilty at some specific time in the past), we can also use it for essential attributes: I find your mother's face uglier than a hand grenade. Or lie, more or less, about the agent or speaker: Your mother's face finds itself uglier than a hand grenade. And of course we can retreat to attributive adjectives again: Your mother has a face uglier than a hand grenade. Your mother comes with an uglier face than a hand grenade. Or we can simply omit the prepositional phrase from the statement of subjective perception, thus completely erasing the real agent: Your mother's face looks uglier [...] than a hand grenade. Korzybski didn't care about the passive voice much, though; E-Prime makes it more difficult but, mostly, not intentionally. As an exception, erasing the agent through the passive voice can misrepresent the speaker's subjective perception as objective: Your mother's face is found uglier than a hand grenade. But that still works if we use any of the alternative, E-Prime-permitted passive-voice auxiliary verbs: Your mother's face gets found uglier than a hand grenade. As Bourland said, I have "transform[ed] [my] opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things". As another example, notice all the times I've used "as" here. Many of these times smuggle in a covert assertion of essential attributes or even of identity! But I found it very interesting to notice these things when E-Prime forced me to rethink how I would say them with the copula. It seems like just the kind of mental exercise to heighten my attention to implicit assumptions of identity and essentiality that Korzybski intended. I wrote the above in E-Prime, by the way. Just for fun.
brookst 1y ago
Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- kragen 1y ago
  That doesn't make sense. It's like saying that the best general advice about which way to turn when you're driving is to turn right. From your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308, and from the fact that you used the passive voice in your comment ("they should be avoided") apparently without noticing, it appears that the reason you have this opinion is that you don't know what the passive voice is in the first place.
  - CrazyStat 1y ago
    I can’t find it, but I remember reading an article a year or two ago with an analysis showing some of the most vocal critics of the passive voice used the passive voice more often than most of their contemporary writers.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Probably http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.h..., giving specific statistics on Orwell and on Strunk & White, linked from https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.
      - CrazyStat 1y ago
        Thank you!
        1y ago

Veen 1y ago

I always like to share this when the passive voice comes up: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBkGG3BC6dk&si=24Zrw1e8GSEZR7cG https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3uBk...

kragen 1y ago
Pullum is fantastic, thanks! I didn't know he'd recorded video lectures on this topic.

exe34 1y ago

My favourite: "a decision was made to...". It means "I decided to do this, but I don't have the balls to admit it."

IggleSniggle 1y ago
That's funny, I always thought that meant, "my superior told me I had to do this obviously stupid thing but I'm not going to say my superior was the one who decided this obviously stupid thing." Only occasionally, that is said in a tongue-and-cheek way to refer directly to the speaker as the "superior in charge of the decision."
- dylan604 1y ago
  That reads like several comments I've left in code when I've been told to do something very obviously dumb, but did not want to get tagged with the "why was it done this way?" by the next person reading the code
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  You’re both right; I’ve seen it used both ways.
horsawlarway 1y ago
That's funny because I read this entirely differently (somewhat dependent on context) "A decision was made to..." is often code for "The current author didn't agree with [the decision that was made] but it was outside their ability to influence" Often because they were overruled by a superior, or outvoted by peers.
Boldened15 1y ago
Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware. Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity. Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.

coliveira 1y ago

Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.

insane_dreamer 1y ago
The subject can also be the feature itself. active/passive: - The Manage User menu item changes a user's status from active to inactive. - A user's status is changed from active to inactive using the Manage User menu item.
- normie3000 1y ago
  Object-orientated vs subject-orientated?
  - trealira 1y ago
    The passive voice just switches the roles so that the patient is the subject and the agent is the object (e.g. in "The ball was kicked by John," the ball is still the patient despite being the subject). It's just that with English word order, it also switches the places of the things in the sentence. In languages with more flexible word order, you could just switch the two without passive voice. You could just say the equivalent of "The ball kicked John," with it being clear somehow that the ball is the grammatical object and John the subject, without needing to use the passive voice at all.
    - kragen 1y ago
      While that's true, many of those languages with more flexible word order, such as classical Greek and classical Latin, also have the passive voice. Classical Greek even has a third voice called the "middle voice".
      - trealira 1y ago

dylan604 1y ago

> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?

badlibrarian 1y ago
29% overhead (two of seven words) adds up.
- dylan604 1y ago
  great, someone can do math, but it is not awkward nor wordy.
  - badlibrarian 1y ago
    It's wordy to a high school teacher. Like using "nor" incorrectly it will cause some people's brows to furrow. Always best to be aware of the rules you choose to break.
- suzzer99 1y ago
  I reduced my manuscript by 2,000 words with Grammarly. At 500 pages, anything I could do to trim it down is a big plus.

ipaddr 1y ago

#2 Is the most pleasant form. The proposal being approved is the most important. #1 Tries to make the manager approving more important then the approval.