On some of the specialist forums (or “fora” if you prefer) , which I frequent, I get the message “You have been successfully logged in”.
Intutively, semantically-wise, I am not entirely comfortable with that … it seems to me that logging-in is an active, rather than a passive, process, and that the message should really read “You have logged in successfully”.
What do the more accomplished grammarians here think?
Some say you are “logged on” after you “logon”, so there’s that.
My 92-year-old mother once asked my who Logan was. I was mystified until she said her computer was asking her to logon.
Well I’d say it’s a two step process. When you type your username and password you’re logging in. As the server authenticates those you’re being logged in.
Most actions can be written in active voice or passive voice and I don’t know who gets to say that either is “preferred”.
The message “You have been logged in .” is coming from the system. It is the system talking about what the system has done. The system has received your request to be allowed to start using the system, it has approved this request and it has even entered the fact is has approved your request into the log.
Of course the user cannot write the log , because the user cannot be trusted.
I agree with the above. You “log in” when you enter your info, but the system has a matching process where it acknowledges your log in which is also called logging in. Thus, the system has logged your log in attempt and “you have been logged in” is a correct message.
Yo dawg, I heard you liked logging in so…
The grammatical property of “log in” responsible for this variability is that it can be used both intransitively and transitively. The passive construction is parasitic on the transitive use. In the intransitive use, the subject names the entity who has gained access, and in the transitive use, the direct object takes on that role, the subject now naming a causal agent. When the transitive variant undergoes passivization as in “you have been logged in”, the subject once again names the access-gainer, but there is an implied causal agent.
According to my high school English teacher, active voice is definitely preferred.
There is covered under Mapcase’s Rule #11: Anything your high school English teacher taught you was a rule is not.
Not true: only actions named by transitive verbs can be written in active or passive voice, at least in English. Intransitive verbs cannot be passivized. I repeat: the crucial property of “log in” responsible for the variability noted by the OP is that it has both a transitive and an intransitive use.
Gonna switch gears here: I think if you’ve been logged-in, you shouldn’t see any message at all. Just the normal logged-in interface. There’s no point to interrupting the user with such a pointless message-- only tell them if the log in failed.
This is true but misleading. The true part is that intransitive verbs cannot be directly passivized. But actions can be. In this case the action can be active or passive and is therefore represented by a verb that can be active or passive. I’m trying to think of an exception and failing, so I may be wrong on this, but all actions can be written in such a way.
Note the parallel to the OP’s sentence, “You have been successfully logged in [to the system]”. Part of the prepositional phrase has been elided but the meaning is clear.
This whole discussion is behind a major reason why English teachers promulgate “rules.” Once you get into nuances the variations never end. Real books on English grammar are several inches thick and are as readable as a physics textbook. Even the basic papers on the passive voice require a technical vocabulary that virtually none of us have. (That link goes to a download of a .pdf) It’s not difficult to pick up statist vs. agentive verbs or syntactic transitivity vs. semantic transitivity but “sufficiently rhematic” required some digging. Only academicians need to know this. Most professional writers wouldn’t have a clue. The task of English teachers is to instill into their students the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm to the English language. It doesn’t have to be pretty; it just needs to be unobjectionably not-wrong.