4 ms·

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.
  - kragen 1y ago
    I think those are important considerations, but it depends even more on what you are attempting to express in the sentence in question. There's plenty of active-voice phrasing in the Gettysburg Address and Ecclesiastes that would not be improved by rewriting it in the passive voice.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > 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 [...] It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice. But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".
  - kragen 1y ago
    You could be right.
DonHopkins 1y ago
Mistakes were made in the documentation.
School-Cotton 1y ago
You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your comment. Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.
- brookst 1y ago
  Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    Why isn’t it passive voice?
  - kragen 1y ago
    Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice. But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make". I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with. Why am I not sure it's correct? If I say, "In addition to the blood so red," I am quite sure that "red" is not in the passive voice, because it's not even a verb. It's an adjective. Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in English in contexts that are unambiguously not passive-voice verbs; for example, in "Vito is a made man now," the past participle "made" is being used as an attributive adjective. And this is structurally different from the attributive-verb examples of "truly verbal adjectives" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English, such as "The cat sitting on the fence is mine," and "The actor given the prize is not my favorite;" we could grammatically say "Vito is a man made whole now". That page calls the "made man" use of participles "deverbal adjectives", a term I don't think I've ever heard before: > Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and similar meaning to) the participles, but behave grammatically purely as adjectives — they do not take objects, for example, as a verb might. For example: (...) Interested parties should apply to the office. So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made", is it deverbal as it would be in "the already-made points" despite its positioning after the noun (occasionally valid for adjectives, as in "the blood so red"), or is it something else? I don't know. The smoothness of the transition to "the points already made by those numbskulls" (clearly passive voice) suggests that it is a passive-voice verb, but I'm not sure. In sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 jcranmer says it's something called a "bare passive", but I'm not sure. It's certainly a hilarious thing to put in a comment deploring the passive voice, at least.
PlunderBunny 1y ago
It has its place. We were told to use passive voice when writing scientific document (lab reports, papers etc).
- kragen 1y ago
  To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
  - modriano 1y ago
    Are we talking about survivorship bias or are you comparing comparably important levels of papers?
    - kragen 1y ago
      It's hard to correct completely for survivorship bias, but it still holds very clearly for very prominent recent papers and for other papers that happen to be in the same journal issue as the old paper I went there looking for.
lazyasciiart 1y ago
You could improve this comment by rewriting it in the active voice, like this: “I am painfully bored by reading passive voice”.
- kragen 1y ago
  "Is painfully boring" is not the passive voice. I suggest reading https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.

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.
- kragen 1y ago
  I think those are important considerations, but it depends even more on what you are attempting to express in the sentence in question. There's plenty of active-voice phrasing in the Gettysburg Address and Ecclesiastes that would not be improved by rewriting it in the passive voice.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> 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 [...] It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice. But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".
- kragen 1y ago
  You could be right.

DonHopkins 1y ago

Mistakes were made in the documentation.

School-Cotton 1y ago

You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your comment. Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.

brookst 1y ago
Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  Why isn’t it passive voice?
- kragen 1y ago
  Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice. But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make". I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with. Why am I not sure it's correct? If I say, "In addition to the blood so red," I am quite sure that "red" is not in the passive voice, because it's not even a verb. It's an adjective. Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in English in contexts that are unambiguously not passive-voice verbs; for example, in "Vito is a made man now," the past participle "made" is being used as an attributive adjective. And this is structurally different from the attributive-verb examples of "truly verbal adjectives" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English, such as "The cat sitting on the fence is mine," and "The actor given the prize is not my favorite;" we could grammatically say "Vito is a man made whole now". That page calls the "made man" use of participles "deverbal adjectives", a term I don't think I've ever heard before: > Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and similar meaning to) the participles, but behave grammatically purely as adjectives — they do not take objects, for example, as a verb might. For example: (...) Interested parties should apply to the office. So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made", is it deverbal as it would be in "the already-made points" despite its positioning after the noun (occasionally valid for adjectives, as in "the blood so red"), or is it something else? I don't know. The smoothness of the transition to "the points already made by those numbskulls" (clearly passive voice) suggests that it is a passive-voice verb, but I'm not sure. In sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 jcranmer says it's something called a "bare passive", but I'm not sure. It's certainly a hilarious thing to put in a comment deploring the passive voice, at least.

PlunderBunny 1y ago

It has its place. We were told to use passive voice when writing scientific document (lab reports, papers etc).

kragen 1y ago
To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
- modriano 1y ago
  Are we talking about survivorship bias or are you comparing comparably important levels of papers?
  - kragen 1y ago
    It's hard to correct completely for survivorship bias, but it still holds very clearly for very prominent recent papers and for other papers that happen to be in the same journal issue as the old paper I went there looking for.

lazyasciiart 1y ago

You could improve this comment by rewriting it in the active voice, like this: “I am painfully bored by reading passive voice”.

kragen 1y ago
"Is painfully boring" is not the passive voice. I suggest reading https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.